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A History of Christian Doctrine

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A HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE

A HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE In Succession to the Earlier Work of

G. P. FISHER

Published in the International Theological Library Series

Edited by HUBERT CUNLIFFE-JONES Assisted by BENJAMIN DREWERY

FORTRESS PRESS PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 1978 T. & T. Clark Ltd. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo¬ copying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of T. &> T. Clark Ltd.

First Fortress Press Edition 1980 Second Printing 1981

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Main entry under title: A History of Christian doctrine. Bibliography: p. Includes indexes. 1. Theology, Doctrinal—History—Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Cunliffe-Jones, Hubert. II. Drewery, Benjamin. III. Fisher, George Park, 1827-1909. History of Christian doctrine. BT21.2.H57 1980 230’.09 79-21689 ISBN 0-8006-0626-4

9312J81

Printed in the United States of America

1-626

Preface This history has been unconscionably long in the making. Commissioned in the sixties, it was initially planned in 1968, and the editor hoped to receive the scripts from his contributors by December 1970. The only contributor who actually achieved this was the late Dom David Knowles, to whom tribute must be paid. He was, of course, a very dis¬ tinguished medieval historian, and I was by no means sure of winning his consent; but in his retirement, as he had never written on the history of doctrine, he welcomed the opportunity of focussing the results of his long experience on this aspect of medieval history. With regard to the other contributors, the editor had a lot to learn about unexpected commitments which hindered the fulfilment of promises, the incidence of illness, and the varied attitudes of contributors to the com¬ pletion of material. In the event, one major contributor was obliged to withdraw almost completely, and I am deeply grateful to those who accepted assignments to take over smaller parts of the whole section. To those who have had to wait for the publication of their work because the manuscript was still incomplete, I present my apologies. Two contri¬ butors in particular, who sent in their material without undue delay, Professor Lampe and Dr. Ware, and who have taken the opportunity to revise their material before publication, have in this way rendered the book a further service. The editor has not sought to restrict the variety of points of view from which the history is presented, because history is a normative study, not (except in detail) an exact one, and it demands continual reassessment. But in the result, what the contributors have presented should prove, for the most part, to be an acceptable general introduction to the period concerned and sometimes even a pioneering work in uncharted fields. But the final contributor, covering the centuries in which the need for reassessment is clearly greatest, has offered instead a presentation which is indeed acute, stimulating, and the product of very great learning, but which because it is not likely to win universal assent will need, for the purpose of a general introduction, to be supplemented from other sources. The questions how¬ ever which he raises, and the authors to which he particularly calls atten¬ tion, certainly need to be taken into account in any satisfactory understand¬ ing of Christian doctrine in the last three centuries. The whole enterprise owes an immense debt to my colleague in the department of Ecclesiastical History, the Rev. Benjamin Drewery. When I retired from the Chair of Theology in the University of Manchester in July 1973, there seemed a real possibility that the whole enterprise, with all the precious freight then on board, might well founder. But he came to its aid. In addition to what he has written on Luther, and on the Council

vi

Preface

of Trent, he has brought to the work not only an intense interest in the history of Christian doctrine and a concern that this book should be finished, but an editorial experience and skill that has been invaluable. It has been a happy experience for me to have as collaborator in the working out of the final stages of the book, a colleague with whom I had such a common mind, and who was so energetic in his labours. In addition, he brought to its assistance the willing and interested technical help of the secretary of the Ecclesiastical History department, Miss Gillian Shepherd, to whom we give our warmest thanks. To the secretary of the department of Theology, Mrs. Dorothy Johnson, who saw me through the earlier stages of the enterprise, I am also deeply indebted. My overriding indebtedness is to the publishers, T. and T. Clark Ltd., first for their initial commissioning of the work, then for their patience and understanding during the long delays in the fulfilment of that commission, even though they knew from the start that the completion of the work would present them with an immensely difficult publishing responsibility. H. Cunliffe-Jones.

Table of Contents Preface ........... List of Contributors ......... Bibliographical Note ......... Acknowledgements .........

v xi xiii xiv

INTRODUCTION.i H. Cunliffe-Jones CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY IN THE PATRISTIC PERIOD . 21 G. W. H. Lampe I. The Apostolic Fathers and the Second Century Movements 23 II. The Greek Apologists ....... 30 III. Melito and Irenaeus ....... 40 IV. Early Latin Theology: Tertullian and Novatian . . 51 V. The Alexandrian Theologians of the Third Century . 64 VI. Eastern Theology from Origen to the Council of Nicaea . 85 VII. The Development of Trinitarian Theology after the Council of Nicaea ........ 98 VIII. The Christological Controversies . . . . .121 IX. Salvation, Sin and Grace . . . . . .149 X. The Church and the Sacraments . . . . .170 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY IN THE EAST 600-1453. . . 181 Kallistos Ware I. The General Character of Byzantine Theology . .183 II. The Seventh Century. The Monotheletes; St. Maximus the Confessor . . . . . . . .187 III. The Iconoclast Controversy. ..... 191 IV. Constantinople and Rome (858-1439) . . . .201 V. Mystical Theology: St. Symeon the New Theologian and the Hesychasts . . . . . . .216 THE MIDDLE AGES 604-1350 ...... 227 David Knowles Introductory ......... 229 I. From Gregory the Great to Charlemagne. Rome and Con¬ stantinople . . . . . . . .231 1. The Monothelete Controversy . . . .231

Table of Contents

viii

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

The Iconoclast Controversy .... 234 The Spanish Adoptionists . . . . .236 The Filioque Controversy ..... 237 The Development of the Discipline of Penance . 238 Indulgences ....... 240

II. From Charlemagne to the Eleventh Century . . . 1. The First Eucharistic Debate .... 2. Predestination. ...... 3. The Breach between East and West . . .

242 242 243 244

III. The Age of Revival and Reform 1000-1150 . . . 246 1. The Second Eucharistic Controversy . . .246 2. Anselm of Bee and Canterbury .... 247 3. Abelard ........ 249 4. The Problem of Reordination .... 252 5. The Influence of Bernard ..... 253 6. The Virgin Mary ...... 254 IV. The First Century of Scholastic Theology c. 1050—c. 1200 . 257 1. Theological Education 600-1160 . . . 257 2. Canon Law and the Sacraments . . .261 3. Heresy ........ 263 V. The Golden Age of Scholasticism ..... 266 1. Theological Education 1160-1300 . . . 266 2. Philosophy and Theology . . . . .268 3. Bonaventure and Albert the Great . . . 269 4. Thomas Aquinas . . . . . .271 VI. The Later Scholastics . . . 280 The Condemnations of 1270 and 1277. Duns Scotus 280 The Rhineland Neoplatonists .... 282 William of Ockham c. 1300—c. 1349 . . . 283 Scholasticism in Retrospect . . . .285

The Breakdown of the Thomist Synthesis

1. 2. 3. 4.

CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE FROM 1350 TO THE EVE OF THE REFORMATION.287 E. Gordon Rupp John Wyclif ......... 289 John Hus ......... 293 John Gerson ......... 295 Gerhard Groote ........ 296 Nicholas of Cusa ........ 298 Marsilius Ficmo and Florentine Platonism .... 299 Fifteenth-Century Scholasticism - John of Wesel, John Pupper of Goch, Wessel Gansfort, Gabriel Biel. . . . 300 Erasmus .......... 302

ix

Table of Contents

A NOTE ON THEOLOGY IN THE CHRISTIAN EAST: THE FIFTEENTH TO SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES . .

305

Kallistos Ware

MARTIN LUTHER. Benjamin

3ii

Drewery

Introduction

......... Luther’s Theology in the Making ..... Luther’s Matured Theology ...... 1. Sola Fide equals Sola Gratia equals Christus 2. God : Man : The Law ..... God hidden and revealed The knowledge of God and human reason The Law ...... Christian Liberty .... The ‘Two Kingdoms' .... 3. Church and Sacraments .... ULRICH ZWINGLI .

3i3

3i5 322 322 330 330

331

334 33^ 338

344 35i

Basil Hall

PHILIP MELANCHTHON AND MARTIN BUCER . . .371 E. Gordon Rupp Philip Melanchthon ... .... 373 Martin Bucer ......... 378 JOHN CALVIN.385 T. H. L. Parker THE COUNCIL OF TRENT.401 Benjamin

Drewery

Scripture and Tradition ....... Justification ......... Sacraments ......... SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ANGLICAN THEOLOGY . H. F. Woodhouse

.

404 406 408

.411

THE HISTORY OF DOCTRINE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.425 R.

Buick

Knox

A NOTE ON THEOLOGY IN THE CHRISTIAN EAST: THE EIGHTEENTH TO TWENTIETH CENTURIES . -453 Kallistos Ware

x

Table of Contents

CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY IN THE EIGHTEENTH TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURIES.459 John H. S. Kent I. The Eighteenth Century . . . . . .461 II. The Nineteenth Century ...... 489 III. The Doctrine of the Church in the whole period . . 520 IV. Social Theology in the whole period . . . .541 V. The Twentieth Century ...... 565

List of Contributors The Rev. Professor Hubert Cunliffe-Jones, B.Litt., M.A.(Theol.), D.D. Emeritus Professor of Theology, University of Manchester. The Rev. Professor Geoffrey William Hugo Lampe, M.C., D.D., F.B.A. Regius Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge. The very Rev. Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, M.A., D.Phil. Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies, University of Oxford. The late Dom David Knowles, Litt.D., F.B.A. formerly Emeritus Regius Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge. The Rev. Professor Ernest Gordon Rupp, M.A., D.D., F.B.A. Emeritus Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History, University of Cambridge. The Rev. Benjamin Drewery, M.A. Bishop Fraser Senior Lecturer in Ecclesiastical History, University of Manchester. The Rev. Basil Hall, M.A., Ph.D., D.D., F.R.Hist.S., F.S.A. Dean of St. John’s College, Cambridge. The Rev. Thomas Henry Louis Parker, M.A., D.D. Reader in Theology, University of Durham. The Rev. Professor Hugh Frederic Woodhouse, M.A., D.D. Archbishop King’s Professor of Divinity, University of Dublin. The Rev. Robert Buick Knox, M.A., B.D., Ph.D. Nivison Professor of Church History, Westminster College, Cambridge. The Rev. John Henry Somerset Kent, M.A., Ph.D. Professor of Theology, University of Bristol.





'

Bibliographical Note G. P. Fisher set an excellent precedent for historians of Christian doctrine in giving no bibliography in his History of Christian Doctrine. But reviewers, teachers, students, may expect one. Bibliographies are important but they are not stable and easily go out of date. All bibliographies are constantly being reassessed. In our studying everyone requires a listening ear and a perceptive eye to become aware of new work of real quality. Yet older books, even if they may go out of fashion for a time, often need to be rediscovered. There are some references to books here and there in the text. But for the student who is beginning we would recommend the bibliographies in F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone: The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church 2nd Edition O.U.P. 1974 (or alternatively Douglas, J. D. (ed.): The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church Paternoster (1974)). Students should search the catalogue under the name of the person that specifically interests them in the library of any educational or public institution handy to them that takes theological studies seriously.

Acknowledgements The Editor expresses his thanks to T. and T. Clark Ltd. for entrusting him with the responsibility of preparing this volume and the encouragement which T. G. Clark Esq., T. G. Ramsay Clark Esq., and Dr. Geoffrey F. Green have given to him. The Editors and Publishers express their gratitude to the following Publishers for permission to use copyright material: The Clarendon Press, Oxford; R. F. Evans: Pelagius — Inquiries and Reappraisals', A. and C. Black Ltd.; Faber and Faber Ltd.; The Faith Press Ltd.; Basil Blackwell; James Clarke and Co. Ltd.; S.P.C.K.; Cambridge University Press. The Rev. B. Drewery wishes to express his thanks to the Rev. Dr. W. Peter Stephens, of Wesley College, Bristol, for the loan of an (unpublished) paper on Luther’s doctrine of the Two Kingdoms. He also wishes to acknowledge above all the unwearying kindness of his tutor, colleague and friend, the Rev. Professor E. Gordon Rupp, without whose oral and published guidance and instructions he could not have written one word. The Editors are deeply indebted to Professor C. N. L. Brooke, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge, who has revised the proofs of the late Dom David Knowles’ contribution.

Introduction

H. Cunliffe-Jones

The first edition of G. P. Fisher’s History of Christian Doctrine was pub¬ lished in 1896. After more than seventy years, it is high time that a new treatment of the history, with consideration of nearly a hundred additional years of theological reflection, should be undertaken. But Fisher’s History has held its place, and deservedly held its place, right up to the present, as the best one-volume History of Christian Doctrine available for the student. 1. TRIBUTE TO G. P. FISHER It is fitting that the new edition should begin by paying a tribute to Fisher, whose work even if it needs now to be superseded deserves the highest respect. George Park Fisher was born on August 10th, 1827, and died on December 20th, 1909. He was a Congregational Minister and historian and was the son of Lewis Whiting and Nancy Fisher, and a grandson of Lewis and Luther Fisher, whose descent is traced to the family of Samuel Fisher, the noted Quaker apologist and martyr, contemporary and friend of George Fox. He was born in Wrentham, Massachusetts, where he attended the State schools until he graduated from Brown University in 1847. Then he studied at Yale Divinity School where Nathaniel W. Taylor was his teacher of Systematic Theology. He went for a time to Auburn Theological Semi¬ nary, but he completed his three years’ theological course in 1851 at Andover, Massachusetts, where Professor Edward A. Park was the leading influence. He had the best training that the leaders of ‘New England Theology’ could offer. It was unusual, then, for theological students to do graduate study abroad, but Fisher spent the years 1852 to 1854 in Germany, where he became acquainted with the theological authorities of the time and received thorough training in the methods of historical research. On his return in 1854 he was called to the Livingstone Professorship of Divinity in Yale College. In 1861 he resigned the Pastorate of the College Church to accept a Professorship of Ecclesiastical History in the Divinity School where he taught continuously till 1901. His books reflect his interest both in general history. Outlines of Universal History 1885, The Colonial Era 1892; in church history, notably his History of the Christian Church 1887; and in the history of Christian theology, particularly the History of Christian Doctrine 1896. A contemporary, Frederick Lynch, called attention both to the com¬ prehensiveness and accuracy of Fisher’s written works, and the character¬ istic that made them unexciting as books to be read through. ‘His knowledge was beyond belief. There seemed to be nothing he did not know. Probably no student in the many years Professor Fisher taught at Yale ever asked him a question he could not answer. His histories, “The History of the Christian Church’’, “The History of Christian Doctrine”, and “The History

4

A History of Christian Doctrine

of the Reformation", partake of this defect as well as of this excellence they are so packed with fact that the flow of style is impeded and the imagination does not find scope for free play.' On the other hand it is quite clear that he came to life outside his writing. Professor Williston Walker paid tribute to him: 'Professor Fisher was a prince of teachers in the classroom. He could illuminate a past age by vivid characterization, or portray the traits of a leader in the Church with graphic and penetrating discrimination. His contact with students was always stimulating. His wit was keen and searching, but not unkindly. His judg¬ ment was sane, careful and impartial. He was also a man who rejoiced in the society of his friends, and who in turn won admiration and affection in a remarkable degree. Possessed of an almost marvellous memory, a story¬ teller of exceptional ability, keen, vivacious, and witty intercourse with him had not only unusual stimulus but a rare charm. He was a delightful companion. His acquaintance on both sides of the Atlantic was such as few scholars possess and his friends loved him no less than they honoured him and delighted to be with him.’ In short, G. P. Fisher was an outstanding scholar and teacher of his own time, whose knowledge went wide and deep, and whose presentation of it was factual, concise and clear. His comprehensiveness can be exaggerated. For example, a reader will look in vain in Fisher's own History of Christian Doctrine for anything on Lutheranism after 1580. But this only shows that he had to draw the line somewhere. All in all, he deserves to be honoured, when the time has at long last come to survey the ground afresh to serve the need of a radically changed and changing situation. 2. THIS VOLUME FOLLOWS THE BROAD LINES OF FISHER’S OWN WORK (a) Apart from the fact that he does not bring the Church into his starting-point, where Fisher started we can start too. ‘Christianity,’ wrote Fisher, ‘is the Revelation of God through Jesus Christ whereby reconcilia¬ tion and a new spiritual life in fellowship with himself are brought to mankind . . . herein Christianity is differentiated from systems of Philosophy . . . Christianity is composed of teachings which are to be proclaimed, and which call for a clear and connected interpretation . . . The History of Christian Doctrine is the record of the series of attempts made in successive periods to embody the contents of the Gospel in clear and self-consistent propositions.’ The modification of this starting-point which is necessary, is to add the awareness of the corporate life of the Church to Fisher’s individualism. Fisher’s individualism is in some ways curious because during the nineteenth century the sense of the importance of the Church and of a true Doctrine of the Church was steadily growing, and Fisher must have known this by the time he wrote. But it did not influence his treatment. Still the agreement in starting-point is quite real. (b) Fisher discussed the question whether the History of Christian Doctrine should have a wider or a more restricted scope. He does this in

Introduction

5

terms of the question whether it should cover the history of dogma or whether it should more broadly consider the history of Christian theology in general. ‘It may be the aim simply to exhibit the history of dogmas; that is, of the definitions of doctrine which have been arrived at either in the Church at large, or in leading branches of it - definitions which, when once reached, were held to be authoritative. A dogma is a distinct conception and perspicuous statement of the doctrine professed by the body, or by a considerable body, of Christian people.’ When Fisher wrote, the distinctive exposition of the history of dogma by Adolf von Harnack was widely influential; but he turned away from it as in principle narrowing. He preferred the alternative. ‘It may undertake to trace the history of theology, not only so far as theological inquiry and discussion have issued in articles of faith, but likewise so far as movements of religious thought are of signal interest, and are often not unlikely to influence sooner or later the moulding of the Christian creed. The present volume will include a survey, as full as is practicable within the space at command, of the course of modern theology down to the present day.’ Here the present edition follows, out of conviction, Fisher’s own line. The history of dogma has its own value, and it is still being freshly ex¬ pounded. But it is only part of a wider concern, and excludes some of the most important questions that need to be considered in the history of Christian theology. (c) Fisher discusses the practice of dividing Doctrinal History into two parts, the General and Special History of Doctrine, and of completing the account of each period under both aspects before advancing to the next. ‘Under the General History there is presented a sketch of the characteristics of the period with a notice of the principal themes of discussion and of the principal writers to whom we are to resort for materials. The General History is an outline map of the period to be traversed. Under the Special History the matter is collected under the loci or rubrics of the theological system.’ He himself had used this method in his lectures, but in preparing the volume for publication he abandoned it for a straight General History. The truth is that General and Special History of Doctrine represent different possible methods of studying the History of Christian Theology. (i) The method of General History enables the continuity and sequence of the historical process to be brought out. (ii) The method of Special History enables the different themes of the Christian creed to be traced in their historical development. (iii) A variant of the method of Special History is to write it in terms of the biographies of the great figures, focussing the total thinking of great theologians in one chapter disentangled both from the movement of General History, and from the topical approach which inevitably separates the different aspects. All these matters in the hands of skilled practitioners are valuable. In this volume we follow Fisher in seeking to trace the General History of Christian Theology. (d) One of the valuable features in Fisher’s own Introduction was a brief survey of the history of the History of Christian Theology. This is a matter

6

A History of Christian Doctrine

urgently needing further research so that we can trace the sequence of those who have pioneered in the study of the History of Christian Theology. Here we need a new lead. We need someone to survey and tell us the methodology that is appropriate to the study of the History of Christian theology in a new ecumenical atmosphere in which there is a new awareness of the vast extent of the subject, and of the very varied nature of the theological and ecclesiastical traditions. Here we can note a few of the outstanding landmarks: (i) The Centuriators of Magdeburg. This was a history of the first thirteen centuries of the Church produced by Lutheran theologians at Magdeburg under the guidance of Matthew Flacius (1520-1575). He was a ‘genuine’ Lutheran, and published between 1559 and 1574 in thirteen folio volumes - one for each century - the Historia Ecclesiae Christi. It was inaccurate and it took liberties with the texts of original documents. Its attitude was that of a rigid Lutheran doctrinal position, and it was con¬ sciously and powerfully anti-Roman in its treatment of the evidence. But it was a landmark in the history of Christian theology because of the breadth of conception it showed of what history and the history of Christian theology involved. It is important in spite of its limitation as giving some vision of the scope of the history of Christian theology. (ii) Fisher calls attention to John Forbes of Corse who wrote the Institutiones Historicae Theologicae (Amsterdam 1645). The purpose of this was to demonstrate how the reformed Church agreed in its doctrine with the doctrine of the Patristic Church. John Forbes’ work has been criticized because it did not open the door to a critical history. But it was important as acknowledging an appeal to Patristic theology as a legitimate test of Christian truth. The combination of Reformation convictions and Patristic testimony make the reading of it a stimulating experience. (iii) Dionysius Petavius (1583-1652) whose main work was the De Theologicis Dogmatibus (Volume I to III 1644, Volume IV 1650). Petavius was an outstanding dogmatic theologian, one of the most brilliant and learned of his age. He was strictly an orthodox Catholic in outlook, but he was one of the first (a) to accept the idea of development in theology and (b) to concede that much patristic teaching was imperfect when it was judged by later standards of developed theology. (iv) For the eighteenth century Johann Salomo Semler (1725-1791) may stand as a representative historian of Doctrine. He goes to the other extreme from the Catholic vision of the stability of dogma by perceiving in history only a moving, steadily changing element; the essence of dogma is only restless change. History for him is governed by the arbitrary powers of subjectivity. At the same time his work represents the first critical examination of primitive Christianity and the development of dogma. It is based on the assumption that Christianity can be regarded only as a historical phenomenon to be studied historically and without dogmatic presuppositions, and that its historical manifestation must be analysed in the context of its historical milieu: that milieu is Jewish, and everything ‘Christian’ can be traced to it. Semler’s criticism is negative; but negative

Introduction

7

criticism is a necessary first stage in the movement toward a truly objective and positive mode of historical consideration. (v) Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), whose influence in the subsequent period has been so great, took the opposite line. He raised in a new radical way searching questions about the uncertainty of historical knowledge. He insisted that ‘the accidental truths of history can never become a proof of necessary truths of revelation’. His thought was not particularly original, but he formulated it in a striking and unforgettable way. He bequeathed to the nineteenth century the idea of progressive revelation and to the twentieth century the unsolved problem of uniting history and revelation. (vi) The great teacher of History of Doctrine in the nineteenth century was Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860). Baur’s discussion of the methods appropriate to the study of the History of Christian theology is to be found primarily in Die Epochen der kirchlichen Geschichtsschreibung, which serves as an introduction to Baur's five-volumed Church History. This work com¬ prises an extensive analysis of various types and periods of Church historio¬ graphy and concludes with a section in which Baur presents his own principles as well as his theology of the Church. A similar and extensive introduction is provided in the first volume of Vorlesungen iiber die christliche Dogmengeschichte, where Baur considers the position of history of dogma in the theological disciplines, the object, methods, and periods of dogma, the relation of the history of dogma to the history of philosophy, and the history of the study of the history of dogma - its origin and develop¬ ment into a science. Baur regards the historical part as an intrinsically important independent reality in shaping the historical present. Both faith and historical knowledge are involved in the work of the historian of doctrine. On the one hand historical critical theology is de¬ pendent on authentic subjective faith, for it is only through the freedom thus achieved that the historical theologian is able to transpose himself critically into the objectivity of the historical data. On the other hand faith is dependent on, or must be instructed by, historical knowledge, since the content of faith is mediated historically and knowable through critical history, and since authentic faith requires the continual prodding and test¬ ing of historical criticism, for its certainty is of a different order from the empirical certainties of this world. Whether Baur came to the point of claiming that faith is not only subjective but actually penetrates to a transcendent reality not apart from but within the objectivity of the historical process is not clear. His un¬ certainty at this point is in one way to his credit, as many of his contem¬ poraries foreclosed the issue in the direction of denying the Transcendent. But he has bequeathed his uncertainty to the twentieth century, and we have not solved the problem in any satisfactory intellectual manner. (vii) It is not proposed to develop further in this introduction even this minute sketch of the history of the History of Christian Theology that is a clear and urgent desideration. There are many aspects of the late nineteenthcentury history of Christian theology which need investigation — e.g. the tendentious Lutheran histories of Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889); and among

8

A History of Christian Doctrine

British thinkers: the treatment of development by Andrew Martin Fairbaim (1838-1912) in Division I - ‘The law of development in Theology and the Church’ - of his study of The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, or the immanentist perspective of Alexander V. G. Allen: The continuity of Christian Thought: A Study of Modern Theology in the light of its history (1884). A rude shock was given to all such perspectives by the publication of the first volume of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics in 1932 with its incisive division of historical Christian thinking into three groups: Roman Catholic theology, Reformation theology, and Neo-Protestant theology. Since then the pendulum has moved back to various new considerations of natural theology; also the growing ecumenical movement, and the decline of religious allegiance in the older established centres of Christian dominance, have produced many different changes of perspective. Two things may be said: i. the history of the History of Christian Theology needs to be written from some kind of stable perspective, even if that stability is only of a temporary kind. How can it be written from an objective stand¬ point if the perspective in which we live is constantly changing? ii. the writing of such a perspective would be more convincingly undertaken if the question of the legitimacy of the appeal to the Transcendent from within an historical perspective had been settled. Nevertheless, we must continue to hope that someone, thoroughly equipped, will undertake the work. 3. BUT THIS VOLUME IS DIFFERENT IN A NUMBER OF WAYS FROM FISHER’S OWN WORK (a) It aims to point out the main aspects of the history without being comprehensive in detail. There are disadvantages in Fisher’s very comprehensiveness. His ac¬ curacy, and the fact that everything was to be found in it, was so useful that students preparing for examinations deemed it unnecessary to proceed to the texts on which the History was based. This is not a good way of studying the History of Christian theology, even if G. P. Fisher’s own work is a first-rate example of the type of text-book that enabled it to be followed. All general histories should be studied with reference to the primary texts. This volume will presuppose that the student will not be content with it but will turn to the texts to make his own judgment as to whether the History is rightly done or not. For the comprehensiveness in detail that the student does in fact often need, he is advised to turn to other sources, e.g. to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church edited by F. L. Cross, of which the second edition was published in 1974. (b) It is written from a series of points of view which seek to do justice to all standpoints of Christian tradition. One of the reasons why this new edition of Fisher is a composite production is that it is not possible now to call on any one scholar to prepare the History of Christian Doctrine because

Introduction

9

the different aspects of the History are now too specialized. Fisher presented the History of Christian Doctrine from a single point of view. There are advantages in a multiple approach. History of Christian theology as a University discipline must cover the whole spectrum of Christian theology impartially: Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Classical Protestant, Decentralized Protestant and Radical Protestant. There is no one perspective from which the History of Christian theology must be seen. The attainment of a reasonable perspective which may be accepted by all qualified students of the subject is a matter not of one point of view but of continuing dialogue between representatives of different theological and ecclesiastical traditions. It is not a question of anyone suppressing his own convictions or his own perspective. These must be expressed. But so far as anyone can, he must approach the material in its own right and see that his own predilections do not distort the material. In any case he must offer his contribution to the History of Doctrine as a contribution to be set in the context of treatments from other points of view. From the point of view of students the advantage of a multiple approach is that they can no longer acquiesce in the supposition that history is just a series of facts universally accepted. History is rather essentially fact plus interpretation, and where interpretations differ widely there may well be different opinions about what the facts actually are. If the reader of this history finds the approaches of the contributors contrasting, or finds himself at variance with the approach of any one, that should be a spur to clarify his own understanding of what the right interpretation is, and how it illuminates the facts. (c) It takes account of much research and interpretation that has been done since Fisher’s time, and points to new research that is still needed. In the first place, it reflects the current awareness of the need to study the History of Orthodox theology. The History of the Eastern Church and its thinking has been very largely neglected; or rather it has been taken for granted that the History of Orthodox theology finished with John of Damascus, and that since that time the Orthodox Church has been fossil¬ ized, so that what its theologians have been thinking about since the eighth century is not worth serious attention. This has been falsified in common awareness by the resurgence of the Orthodox Church in the nineteenth and especially in the twentieth century. There are great treasures to which we have been blind. Even if some of the periods in the history are dull and unimpressive we still ought to know what was being thought in those periods, and to take account of the factors which threw the Orthodox Church on the defensive and made it difficult for it to deploy its own thinking. The History of Orthodox theology has not been fully surveyed, and a great deal remains still to be done, but we are fortunate in this volume to have an authoritative account of the theology from the seventh to the fourteenth century, and some indication of the lines for study in the later history. Further, we need a new survey of the history of Roman Catholic theology since Trent. Too often both on the Catholic and Protestant side there has

io

A History of Christian Doctrine

been a progressive narrowing of the study of the history of theology. Roman Catholics themselves have not fully explored the History of Roman Catholic theology since Trent, understandably in some degree because the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in particular are not centuries they would want to boast about. Catholic theology was on the defensive and showed no great creative aspects. But in the nineteenth century were laid the foundations of the revival of Catholic theology that has taken place in the twentieth century, and at least from the end of the nineteenth century we can trace the burgeoning of the thinking of men like Mohler and New¬ man. A detached history of Roman Ca/tholic theology in these centuries would benefit all students of Christian theology. The history of Scandinavian Lutheran theology has not been written even for Scandinavians themselves, and this is a field that could profitably be explored. The general history of Christian theology ought to take seriously the history of American theology. Up to perhaps the end of the nineteenth century, apart from some outstanding figures of whom it is not true, American Christian theology appears to have been parasitic on Europe for the main content of its thinking. Naturally it has developed this thinking in relation to the demands of its own environment, and this has given it its characteristic colouring. Nevertheless, even in its most highly gifted repre¬ sentatives it has been, in principle, dependent thinking. It is quite clear that at the present time it is not so and developing in its own right. Even so there are many aspects of the past history of American Christian theology which are important and need to be noted even if they do not represent a new creative advance. The place of American theology in the total per¬ spective needs clearly to be explored, and freshly assessed. One of the aspects of the history of Christian doctrine which has been taken into account in this volume is the importance of the fifteenth century. In this volume it has been placed in the context of the Reformation so that the presentation of the Reformation shall take seriously the century and a half which lies before it. This is part of the proper perspective in which the Reformation is to be seen. The fifteenth century needs also to be seen as late Medieval theology, and indeed it is in many ways the Medievalists themselves who are exploring that century afresh. We really need a double treatment of the fifteenth century, so that we can see it both as preparation for the background to the Reformation and also as the late development of the Medieval Period. Lastly, when we come to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the whole development needs consideration. The study of theology in the twentieth century depends upon having a workable perspective of what this development has entailed. This is a difficult subject and it has not yet been brought into common focus. It is certainly an important aspect of the History of Christian Doctrine to see the Nineteenth Century and After as the raising of the question how, in the context of the scientific universe, and taking Christianity seriously as a historical phenomenon, just like any other human part of history, we must still affirm God transcendent incarnate in Christ.

Introduction

11

4. QUESTIONS RAISED BY THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY (starting from the questions that Fisher himself raises) (a) Is theology possible? This is a perennial question. In Fisher’s time it was the unknowable of Herbert Spencer which was the origin of the question for him. But every age has its own way of producing the question whether the activity of theology is possible and meaningful. Three questions seem to be involved. (i) Can we know the transcendent? If the transcendent is in the very nature of the case beyond us, beyond the universe, beyond our knowledge and experience, how can we know it? No logical proof of the reality of the transcendent seems possible. Human beings who reflect on the problem seem to be divided into two groups, one of which would be perfectly content to say that there is no transcendent and no knowledge of it; the other group would say that having reflected on the pr oblem they are compelled to affirm the reality of the transcendent. The compulsion that moves them is not primarily an emotional compulsion, in the sense that they affirm the trans¬ cendent because they have been brought up to do so, and it is part of their habit of life. It is rather their conviction that they affirm the transcendent because it is intellectually unsatisfying not to do so. There is something intellectually unsatisfactory and unilluminating in not affirming that we are, through the very limitations of our human experience, able to see facets of that experience as pointers to what is beyond. The transcendent is that which we in no sense fully know, but which we can apprehend by paying close attention to what is involved and implied in our own human experience. If we are asked: ‘Is this something which is due to the long dominance of the Christian faith in the life of mankind, and is it likely to fade away if the recession from the Christian faith continues?’, our answer must be that it is no more likely that the recession should continue than that in a new way mankind should come to a new affirmation of Christian faith as true. In any case, the convinced Christian must continue to affirm in all circumstances his apprehension of the transcendent as a necessary condition of human life being fully human. For in the last resort the question cannot be decided on probabilities or on trends. It must be decided on apprehension of the truth. (ii) Are theological statements meaningful? It is no use the theologians saying things in their private coteries if the terms they are using, in the way they are using them, amount to no more than a series of meaningless expressions. Two questions are relevant to the meaningfulness of theological statements. One is the question of analogy. God, it has been claimed, is known in statements that are not univocal or equivocal but analogous. In univocal use terms are used in precisely the same sense, in equivocal use the same term is used but the meaning is utterly different. In analogous use the terms have a similarity of meaning which is not precisely the same. Now the question is: is there sufficient similarity between the way terms are used, both of God and man, is the gap between the meaning of the term as applied

12

A History of Christian Doctrine

to God and the meaning of the term as applied to man sufficiently small for us to claim that there is genuine knowledge? This is a question of which there may be different opinions. An illuminating positive use of analogy is to be found in the argument of Bishop Butler on the ignorance of man. Joseph Butler in his Analogy of Religion drew attention to factors within human experience that gave mankind confidence in the moral government of God. This was against the background of a vast ignorance that prevented man having anything like a full understanding of God's plan and purpose. The question of the mean¬ ingfulness of theological statements is the question whether we have sufficient awareness of the reality of God to give us practical confidence that we know him. Yet any such confidence must be held in the context of an ignorance of God so vast that we are constantly aware that we do not understand the full measure of his plan and purpose. The other question which may be raised under this head is whether any¬ thing at all may be adduced to falsify belief in God. If a steadfastly believing Christian dies through a horrible and lingering experience of cancer in its most painful form, why does he not take this as a proof to him that God is not love? Why do not Christians take great experience of human suffering on a large scale caused by natural disaster or by the inhumanity of man to man (e.g. the murder of six million Jews in Germany) as a demonstration that God is not love? In sum, what can count as a crushing affliction to the belief that God is love? If the answer is nothing at all, is the statement that God is love really meaningful? It is worth considering that the religious believer can adduce statements which, if true, though he does not believe that they are true, could be evidence that his belief is unfounded. Such statements would call in question the underlying foundation experiences that lie deeper than his explicit belief in God. For if the spirit of thankfulness, if the aversion to cruelty in one person’s dealing with another, if the spirit of reverence, if the attitude of unselfishness, are meaningless or unworthy experiences, then it seems quite clear that the attempt to affirm the reality of God and the belief that God is love are quite unfounded. The believer thinks that nothing can in fact show this. But if it were shown it would be an empirical matter of fact. (iii) A third question deals with the nature of language in relation to theology. Here Fisher calls attention to the perceptive work of Horace Bushnell in the nineteenth century. Bushnell’s ‘Preliminary Dissertation on the Nature of Language, as related to Thought and Spirit’ in his God in Christ (1849) is relevant here. He raises the question of analogy which we have already mentioned, and also the crucial question of the ‘cognitive’ or ‘non-cognitive’ character of religious language. Theological statements appear to give a true account of reality though they are statements about kinds of facts other than those investigated by the sciences. A number of contemporary philosophers, impressed by the difficulty of showing that statements about God are factual, have offered theories of religious language as non-cognitive. Such statements, they think, give the emotional setting for other statements and experiences. Philo¬ sophers or theologians who think in this way do not mean to rule theology

Introduction

13

out of court. Their intention is to give it a very different slant from that which it has traditionally had. (b) The relation of Christian theology to Faith and the Life of the Church Fisher starts from the faith of the individual believer. We shall start here from the- faith of the Church. Some of the most remarkable statements on the nature of theology in relation to the church have come from Karl Barth. He says ‘Dogmatics is a theological discipline. But theology is a function of the Church.’ ‘Dogmatics is the self-test which the Christian Church puts to herself in respect of the content of her peculiar language about God.' But how does the Church test herself? By theology in respect of the content of her peculiar language about God. This takes place partly by the reflections of individual theologians - sometimes in lonely reflection (e.g. Anselm); sometimes in constant discussion with one another (e.g. the Cappadocian Fathers); properly also always in constant discussion with unbelieving thinkers; and partly by the corporate decisions of the Church. This theological test of the language the Church uses about God is not the only way in which the Church needs to test the language it uses. But it is the test of the adequacy of that language to the Gospel which the Church seeks to proclaim, and to its meaningfulness and adequate articulation in the contemporary scene in the light of the historical discussion of the centuries. What is the relation, then, of this process of theology to that Christian faith which is the response to the truth of the Christian Gospel? Fisher takes the view that ‘the faith of the Christian disciple is not the product of science, but science is the intellectual apprehension of its contents'. In contemporary terms, this is to say, that faith is the first-order reality of which theology is the second-order reality. This means that theology should not be over¬ valued. It is not intrinsically a means for renewing the insight and vitality of faith. That must come from other sources. Only in special circumstances will the articulation of the intellectual content of faith have the result of invigorating faith itself. It should be noted that the question whether the theologian must himself have this personal faith, is one that Fisher himself does not raise. The answer seems to be - not necessarily. It is natural for the theologian himself to be a man of faith; but where anyone combines with agnosticism or atheism an acute sensitivity and an intense interest in Christian theology, he may contribute as effectively as any other theologian to the intellectual articulation of the content of Christian faith. After all theology is intellectual articulation. A theologian must, however, be sufficiently sensitive to what he is articulating to be aware of its nature and content, and in many cases, the most natural and effective way to do this is through personal conviction. (c) The factors involved in formulating theological doctrine Fisher affirmed that three factors were involved in the formulation of Christian doctrines: the word, the spirit, the intellect; or scripture, experi¬ ence, science. These are the factors by whose combined agency a gospel is

14

A History of Christian Doctrine

rendered into systematic expressions of doctrine. And he finds three distortions of the true use of these factors: (i) 'There may be a servile reliance on inherited interpretations of scripture, or the adoption of meanings having no other ground than ecclesi¬ astical prescription. The result is a traditionalism, which fails to penetrate to the core of scriptural teaching.’ (ii) ‘There must be scope for the free activity of Christian feeling. When feeling, however, comes to be considered an immediate fountain of knowl¬ edge, the intellect is deprived of its rights, and the Bible sinks below its proper level.’ (iii) ‘There must be as much scope for the free activity of the intellect in framing Christian doctrine as for Christian feeling. But a third species of perversion in the framing of doctrine arises from the exaggeration of the intellectual factor.’ On this the following comments may be made: (i) Fisher’s insistence on the gospel declared in the Scripture as the objective rule of Christian faith is rightly central. Yet the progress of the study of the literary forms and historical perspective used in Scripture to set forth the Gospel raises in an acute form the problem of distinguishing between that Gospel which is authoritative for Christians and the setting in which it is embedded. Also we now understand that Scripture is rightly to be regarded as tradition, and that it is set in the midst of tradition. The precise determina¬ tion of the authority of scripture as such, the precise determination of the authority of tradition other than scripture and the precise differentiation between scripture and tradition are questions to which the answers are not easily given. In the actual course of historical theology there has been constant appeal to the authority of scripture. But this has operated in different ways. Quite often the appeal to scripture is not an appeal to the originating source of the particular theological conviction, but to confirmatory evidence for a con¬ viction already reached. Sometimes, however, the verbal form of the Bible has exercised a deter¬ mining effect - many times beneficially in conserving an important insight that might otherwise have been minimized or lost; sometimes, however, with harmful effect, binding upon the Church either the meaning or a supposed translation of the meaning in a way that restricted insight into the nature of the Gospel. But, whatever the persisting difficulties in the appeal to the authority of the Gospel in scripture, the appeal must be made. (ii) Feeling has its proper place in the formation of Christian theology as the response to more objective factors determining its process. There are two main ways in which this has happened. The first comes from participation in the activity of worship. This has had both beneficial and harmful effects on the formulation of Christian theology. It has been beneficial in that it has saved theological formulation from becoming too arid and bound it closely to the centralities of Christian truth focussed in the experience of worship. It has had harmful effects where certain forms of devotion which have both met and fostered certain emotional needs have

Introduction

15

exercised a determining effect upon Christian theology, without being subject to the astringent criticism of responsible thinking. (iii) Fisher was strongly hostile to a false rationalism in theology. There is, however, an opposite danger, that theology should be too pious, and rest content with the immediate utterances of Christian faith, and not grapple, with all the energy of mind available, with the task of expressing their truth in the intellectual climate of the day. The Christian theologian must not leave it to the agnostic or atheist to grapple manfully with difficult and pressing intellectual problems which threaten the very humanity of man. There are, however, two types of intellectual activity, and the true functioning of the intellect in Christian theology comes from combining them in the right way. These are: on the one hand, the native form of the ratiocinative intellect arguing with logical precision; on the other hand the mind open to all sources of apprehension in grasping what is real. These two may be called Understanding and Reason; but the distinction has been used in many periods in the history of Christian-theology and the names have changed. Understanding has also been used for the richer form of the use of the intellect, and on the other hand, Reason has sometimes been used not for the higher form but for the use of the mind arguing precisely, logically and narrowly. It is, however, the richer form of the use of the intellect which should have the dominant place in the formulation of Christian theology, without denying the legitimate rights of the argumentative type. In the balanced use of the two types lies the truest insight. (d) Development and Upheaval in Theology The nineteenth century was a century that emphasized development. A notable contribution to the understanding of this was made by John Henry Newman in his Essay on Development written in 1845, which Fisher dis¬ cusses in his Introduction. The twentieth century is much more a century of upheaval. Newman did a great service to both Catholic and Protestant theology in forcing upon the theologians a new consideration of the question of development and the fact that dogmatic propositions had not been the same from the beginning of the Christian era. Both tended to think in static terms and to discuss the matter in purely logical ways. The Reformers, having established the Bible as the source of authority, failed to give theological guidance as to how to deal with the developing tradition which the Reformation itself created. The real question raised by Newman’s own idea of development was the question of the idea from which he started: What is the character of the idea of Christianity which is developing? Agreement on this must take precedence over finding criteria of what developments are true or false. Whatever the importance of noticing development and making provision for it in our thinking, neither logical nor organic continuity determines whether a doctrinal statement or a doctrinal system is true. At every stage the question of truth and adequacy takes precedence over questions of consistency in development.

16

A History of Christian Doctrine

Discontinuity as well as development may have a place in our assessment of truth. The history of the Church is in many ways very disconcerting. We would not have supposed that certain developments which have come to stay would have taken place. Our theories of what God is doing with his Church must take account of how he has allowed the Church to live and change in the course of history. Organic development may mask a funda¬ mental weakening or corruption of the fundamental idea. Periods of up¬ heaval and drastic discontinuity may in fact exhibit a more fundamental continuity of faithfulness to the essential idea. Both organic development and radical discontinuity must be taken into account, with the considera¬ tion of truth and adequacy, in determining what is in fact true theology. True continuity is not incompatible with a Copernican revolution in many aspects. In the continuing discussion both conservative and radical theo¬ logians need patience with one another and a constant attempt to under¬ stand each other. (e) The Relation of the History of Christian Theology to General History and to Church History 1. The distinction between the history involved in the history of Christian theology and that involved in the general history of mankind, is a distinction of content and not of method. Christian theology does not contract out of the general historical scene in order to have its proper characteristics given satisfactory treatment. In point of fact it is in the context of what was happening in that general history that some of the features of the history of Christian theology can be best understood. The failure of theologians to be sensitive to what has been happening in the wider history of mankind militates against the satisfactoriness of their theology, just as the undue sensitiveness and subservience to what has been happening in general history may mean that their theology is less than satisfactory. Unless the historian seeking to understand the way that Christian theology has come to expression in history is really prepared both to set it in the context of the wider history of mankind, and also to accept the fact that he is pursuing a discipline which is governed by principles which are the same which general historians practise, he will do harm to his own craft. 2. What needs to be said specially about the relations of history of Christian theology to Church history is this: the history of Christian theology is in principle a hybrid discipline. That is to say it is both historical and theological. A satisfactory history of Christian theology will be equally competent and illuminating, both on the historical and the theological questions involved. In practice this does not by any means always happen. It may be that the writer is primarily a historian. The historical setting, the historical preparation and outcome of the theology is most illuminatingly presented, but there is no corresponding insight as to what the theology meant and in this respect the history of Christian theology is defective. Or, on the other hand, the author may be primarily a theologian. He does not consciously misrepresent history. He does not fall down on elementary

Introduction

17

historical facts. But his almost exclusive interest is to elucidate the theo¬ logically important character of the great theologians. He is insufficiently equipped technically to elucidate the historical setting in which they are given, the historical preparation for them on the part of lesser men, or the immediate historical consequences of this type of theology. The ideal historian of Christian theology would be grounded deep in the truth of the Gospel and in Christian churchmanship, equally at home in the fields of history and of philosophy, and endowed with powerful gifts of exposition. How far the present volume measures up to this exacting standard is not for us to say. (/) The Relation of the History of Christian Theology to Culture and Sociology Paul Tillich has expressed in striking fashion the relation of his own three volumes of Systematic Theology to Culture as follows: ‘A special characteristic of these three volumes ... is the kind of language used in them and the way in which it is used. It deviates from the ordinary use of biblical language in systematic theology — that is, to support particularly assertions with appropriate biblical quotations. Not even the more satisfactory method of building a theological system on the foundations of a historical, critical, “biblical” theology is directly applied, although its influence is present in every part of the system. Instead, philosophical and psychological concepts are pre¬ ferred, and references to sociological and scientific theories often appear. ... Of course, I am not unaware of the danger that in this way the substance of the Christian message may be lost. Nevertheless, this danger must be risked, and once one has realized this, one must proceed in this direction. . . . Certainly, these three books would not have been written if I had not been convinced that the event in which Christianity was born has central significance for all mankind, both before and after the event. But the way in which this event can be understood and received changes with changing conditions in all periods of history. On the other hand, this work would not have come into existence either, if I had not tried during the larger part of my life to penetrate the meaning of the Christian Symbols which have been increasingly problematic within the cultural context of our time. Since the split between a faith unacceptable to culture and a culture unacceptable to faiGi was not possible for me, the only alternative was to attempt to interpret symbols of faith through expressions of our own culture.’ This passage from Paul Tillich provokes various reflections. (i) The historian of Christian theology should be aware of the cultural context of the theologians and their propositions which he is investigating and recording. All theology is formulated in a cultural background. (ii) Cultural factors have influenced the theology of theologians of the past in ways in which the theologians themselves have not always been aware. (iii) Paul Tillich says that for himself a culture unacceptable to faith and

18

A History of Christian Doctrine

a faith unacceptable to culture constitute a split which is quite intolerable. The historian is, however, bound to ask whether this corresponds to the experience of the Church in history. Has not, in point of fact, the Christian faith and the theology of the Christian faith grown and grown strong in situations where there has been a split between the faith and the culture? Is the attempt to bridge over a split between faith and culture necessarily the best way of ensuring that the content of the Christian faith and the doctrines appropriate are in fact satisfactory? (iv) Another question which the historian will do well to be sensitive to, is whether theologians of the past have been unnecessarily insensitive to the culture in which they have been placed. Their theology may not have an adequate expression of Christian truth precisely because they were unaware of cultural factors in their own situation into which the formulation of Christian doctrine ought rightly to have been spoken. (v) Paul Tillich has spoken of the danger that by using cultural symbols to express Christian truth, the substance of the Christian message may be lost. This is not the only danger. The danger is also that the message may be diluted and an unsatisfactory expression of the Christian message may be given. The historian is bound to investigate whether it has happened at any place in history that through over-sensitiveness to the culture, theology has not properly carried out its function of being properly aware and sensi¬ tive to its own dignity and the respect it desiderates from the culture in which it is set. (vi) A special aspect of the relation of Christian theology to culture is presented by the sociology of religion. Of any theology it can be asked: what social background is the theologian unconsciously presupposing? When the theologian and his audience share a static background, the question is less important than when the theologian lives in a period of rapid social change. In the latter instance the theologian may be presupposing a social back¬ ground that is two generations out of date. The study of the sociology of religion has a salutary astringency for the study of Christian theology. It sets theology firmly in the social background of mankind as a whole, and calls attention to certain objectively ascertained factors of which the theologian may well prefer to be unaware, because they raise questions about the truth and relevance of the theology he is expounding. It is important that the sociology of religion should, however, not be overvalued. It is one thing to call attention to social factors which con¬ sciously or unconsciously have affected the formulation of Christian theology. But such factors do not determine the question of its truth. If the social factor is made all-determining, it destroys confidence in any possi¬ bility of the existence of truth, even the truth that the social factor is all¬ determining. All it can do in fact is to make certain qualifications in the presentation of that truth. But this is an important service. (g) The Relation of the History of Christian Theology to Philosophy Whatever be the right relation of Christian theology to philosophy, their histories are very much entwined. The attitude of Christian theologians to

Introduction

19

philosophy has covered a very wide range from almost total repudiation to almost total subservience. Some theologians make a very sharp division between Christian theology and philosophy. What has the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to do with the god of the philosophers? What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? This division is, however, not necessarily incompatible with the use of philo¬ sophical tools of thought in theology and rational processes of argument. Many theologians will recognize that philosophy and Christian theology have an overlap of interest in the subjects, or some of the subjects, they discuss; and therefore it is incumbent on theologians to be aware both of contemporary philosophy and of the history of philosophy, and aware also of the way in which philosophy has, for better or worse, influenced the actual historical development. Some theologians make special use of a particular philosophy. Notable here is the use of Aristotelianism by St. Thomas Aquinas and in our own day the use of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger by Rudolf Bultmann. On the other hand, some theologians affirm that Christian theology is compatible with any philosophy that does not deny any essential Christian truth, and that there is, on the other hand, no particular philosophy which can be called in a special way Christian. All philosophies which are not incompatible with the Christian truth may serve as useful allies and instruments of formulating Christian theology. Many theologians, perhaps most, have no fixed idea on the relation of Christian theology to philosophy but are concerned to see that in the product it is the Christian theology which controls the philosophy and not vice-versa. In our own day a new question has arisen of the right and duty of the philosopher to scrutinize the meaningfulness of theological terms and the use the theologians make of them. However much theologians may be averse to letting their theology be controlled in any way by the philosophical enquiries of his own, or of his colleagues, there seems no escape from the fact that the philosopher has the right to judge whether or not the terms that the theologian is asking is meaningful. (h) The Relation of the History of Christian Theology to Doctrinal Criticism and Constructive Theology ‘Neither the historian of doctrine,’ as has been said, ‘nor the doctrinal critic can undertake his work in isolation from the other. Their methods are not mutually exclusive. The doctrinal critic requires a knowledge of the history of doctrine, and the historian of doctrine requires a knowledge of the presuppositions which he is using in making his historical inquiries, and some insight into the uses of language in making doctrinal statements. Each must learn from the other.’ The primary duty of the doctrinal critic is to pass judgments upon the truth and adequacy of any doctrinal statement or any doctrinal system. The primary duty of the constructive theologian is to make positive theological statements and submit them to the judgment of the Church. Both in doing their work have presuppositions which they bring to their study.

20

A History of Christian Doctrine

The historian of Christian theology will do his work less satisfactorily if he is not aware of the standards he himself would bring to use in doctrinal criticism and of his own interest and conception of what is the satisfactory doctrinal statement in his own contemporary setting. He cannot pursue his historical studies in isolation from the contemporary scene. That contem¬ porary scene, whether he knows it or not, influences very greatly the questions which he asks of history. He brings the prejudices and pre¬ suppositions of his own time to his historical inquiries. On the other hand, the doctrinal critic and the constructive theologian are influenced, whether they know it or not, by the historical theology of the past. They will do their work much better if they have a critical understanding of that history, and have a conscious rather than an un¬ conscious grasp of how it influences them. As they do their work in the contemporary scene, submitting it to the judgment of their fellows and to the judgment of the Church as a whole, they would also do well to look back into history and see what persons similar to themselves have been like, and the way in which doctrinal criticism and constructive theological statements given in the past have fared in the development of history. A real sensitiveness to the way in which theological statements have been criticized, have often influenced many thinkers and then sometimes ceased to have that influence, is a salutary caution for those who propound theological statements as solutions to new problems. The study of history should not discourage theologians from making constructive statements. It should only cause them to be on their guard against over-confidence that their statements will in fact be accepted. The work of the historian of Christian theology and that of the construc¬ tive theologian are inextricably bound together. Each is quite indispensable to the other. So we present this history not only as an attempt at a more satisfactory introduction to the history of the past, but also as a stimulating tool and resource for the task of the continuing present.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

G. W. H. Lampe

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period G. W. H. Lampe

I THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS AND THE SECOND-CENTURY MOVEMENTS Christian doctrine had already undergone a long period of development by the time that the latest books in the canon of the New Testament had been written; and by that time, in all probability, a number of the writings known as the works of the ‘Apostolic Fathers’ had already appeared. There is an overlap in time between the New Testament and those writings which have traditionally been treated as though they were the products of a sub-apostolic age following after the ‘New Testament period’ in a clearly defined chronological succession. On the one hand, II Peter and probably other canonical writings are later in date than some at least of the Apostolic Fathers; on the other, it is conceivable that the Didache is very early indeed, perhaps dating from well within what is generally thought of as the New Testament period. From one point of view, then, it might be said that the Apostolic Fathers and some of the New Testament writings belong together as evidence for the history of doctrine at the end of the first century and the first half of the second. On the other hand, there can be little doubt that nearly all the canonical books do have an originality and freshness which is for the most part lacking in the Apostolic Fathers. These tend to be derivative; for although it is true that the New Testament canon has not yet emerged as such, yet the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles are regarded as authorities, the idea of an ‘apostolic age' is developing, and Church leaders are looking to the traditions of the churches and to the forms of Church order which seem to safeguard the traditions handed down from the past, for protection against dangerous innovations and for guidance in the preservation of a supposed original and authentic deposit of truth. The writings of the Apostolic Fathers are occasional pieces, evoked by contemporary needs. They do not include any works of systematic theology, and although they are of the greatest historical and literary interest, heightened by the fact that the first three-quarters of the second century is a period from which relatively little Christian literature has survived, they cannot be said to provide much important material for the history of Christian thought. On the whole these writers are content to reproduce ideas and language which were already traditional in the churches and familiar in the Gospels and Epistles. They do this, moreover, without for the most part seeming to be able to present to their readers the authentic gospel as we find it in the New Testament. We may feel some surprise, for instance, on finding that Clement of Rome in his letter to the church at Corinth cites the fourth ‘Servant Song’ from Isa. 53 and part of Ps. 22

A History of Christian Doctrine

24

only in order to draw the somewhat pedestrian and moralistic lesson that Jesus is an example of humility and therefore the congregation at Corinth should learn to abandon their factious pride and restore the presbyters whom they have unjustly deposed.1 These writers have often been re¬ proached, too, for their apparent failure to appreciate the Pauline doctrine of justification and grace; and, again, there is some truth in this criticism. The homily known as II Clement opens with a reminder of the sufferings of Christ ‘for our sakes’, but it continues in a quite unprecedented fashion by asking ‘What recompense then shall we give to him?’; later it asserts that almsgiving is good, like repentance from sin; fasting is better than prayer, but almsgiving than both.2 Nevertheless, it would be unfair to Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Hermas, Polycarp and the other writers of this period, to write them down as inferior Christians who introduced a kind of slump in the quality of the Church’s preaching and teaching after the great achievements of the apostolic age. In the first place, the New Testament, with so large a proportion of its pages occupied by the Pauline and Johannine literature, probably gives a misleading picture of the thought of the primitive Church. It did not move at a consistently high level, followed by a sudden descent to a less elevated intellectual and spiritual plane of the Apostolic Fathers; it clearly followed a fairly consistent level, represented perhaps by Luke-Acts, the Pastoral Epistles and other New Testament writings, and also by the post-canonical literature, above which there stand out in lofty isolation the two great peaks of the Pauline and the Johannine writings. Secondly, it must be remembered that the themes with which these later authors had to deal were different from those which had occupied St. Paul. They do not have to deal with the question of the Law and grace in the same way at all, and much of their attention had to be focussed on the problems of moral conduct as these arose in the Christian communities, such as the disorder in the Corinthian congregation. It must not be forgotten, too, that for them the scriptures were absolutely authoritative, and that many apparent lapses in the direction of a Judaizing legalism, such as II Clement’s remarks about almsgiving removing the burden of sin,3 were directly derived from scriptural sources such as Tobit. It is not because these writers are uninteresting or inferior that they present little of importance for the history of doctrine but rather because they do not set out to deal with the major aspects of Christian faith in any systematic way. There are, however, a number of passages which throw passing and incidental light on the development of Christian thought. Clement, for instance, speaks of God as ‘Master of the universe’;4 he calls God ‘Father’ and links this appellation with God’s creativity; he is ‘Father and Creator of the whole world’.5 This is an idea which adumbrates that combination of biblical and Platonist language about God which appears so strongly from the Greek Apologists onwards when scriptural phrases 1 2 3 4 5

i Clem. 16. 2 Clem, i, 16. ib. 16. i Clem. 8. ib. 19.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

25

about God’s Fatherhood come to be glossed in terms of the ‘Father and Maker of the universe’ of the Timaeus. Stoicism is also exerting an influence, as in Clement’s remarkable appeal to the orderliness and uniformity of nature, and so to the revelation through this of God’s beneficent and sovereign rule, as a lesson in good order in the Christian society:1 ‘Seeing that we have this pattern, let us conform ourselves with all diligence to his will.’2 A similar emphasis on the goodness of creation, though in a different context, appears in the Didache where, again, the idea that God is ‘all¬ sovereign Master' is prominent.3 The same thought is more fully developed by Hermas: ‘God . . . who by his invisible and mighty power and by his great wisdom created the world and by his glorious purpose clothed his creation with beauty and by his strong word fixed the heaven and founded the earth upon the waters and by his own wisdom and providence formed his holy Church . . .’,4 a passage where even this unphilosophical writer is speaking of God’s activity in terms familiar to Greek readers, such as ‘providence’ (pronoia), and naming those attributes of God which were soon to be hypostatized and identified with the pre-existent Christ - a process which had indeed already begun in the New Testament. It is not therefore surprising to find Hermas enunciating a doctrine of God in a quasi-credal form in the opening words of his Mandates. ‘First of all,’ he says, ‘believe that God is one, even he who created all things and set them in order, and brought all things from non-existence into being, who comprehends all things, being alone incomprehensible.’5 The problem of relating these concepts of God to the Christian encounter with God in the person of Jesus Christ had not yet evoked any marked development in Trinitarian theology over and above the stages which this had reached in the New Testament writings. Clement uses Trinitarian language in his letter to the Corinthian church: ‘Have we not one God and one Christ and one Spirit of grace, the Spirit that has been poured out on us?’6 It is significant for the subsequent history of doctrine that what is said about the Spirit is directly related to the experience of the Christian life in the Church. For a long time to come what is said about God and Christ and their mutual relationship will be stated in terms of theological meta¬ physics, while what is said about the Spirit will be stated in the more direct and practical terms of ‘grace’, ‘power’, ‘illumination’, and prophetic and other charismatic gifts. A similar passage runs: ‘For God lives, and Jesus Christ lives, and the Holy Spirit and the faith and hope of the elect. . . .’7 Ignatius uses similar Trinitarian language, exhorting the Magnesians to act ‘by faith and by love, in the Son and Father and in the Spirit',8 and working out an elaborate simile of the Church members as ‘stones of a

1 ib. 20. 2 ib. 23. 3 Did. 10. 4 vis. 1.1.3. 5 mand. 1.1. 6 j Clem. 46. 7 ib. 58. 8 Magn. 13.

A History of Christian Doctrine

26

temple, prepared for a building of God the Father hoisted up through the crane of Jesus Christ which is the Cross, and using for a rope the Holy Spirit’.1 More important is his very direct ascription of deity to Christ as the Son and Word of God. ‘The one God manifested himself through Jesus Christ his Son who is his Word that proceeded from silence.’2 This is a remarkable concept of the Son as the revelation of the transcendent God. He is the uttered word of God because he is the divine purposive mind as expressed to men;3 he is the mouth by which God has communicated with them.4 Hence Christ is often called, simply, ‘our God',5 and Ignatius can speak, in terms which would seem extraordinarily paradoxical to the Greek world where the impassibility of the divine was held to be an axiomatic truth, of ‘the passion of our God’.6 Prayer to Christ is assumed as a natural expression of faith.7 The beginnings' of Christology in these writers are still rudimentary. Ignatius merely sets the divine and human aspects of the person of Christ alongside each other, in terms which recall the foreshadowing of the later doctrine of the two natures in the opening words of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Christ is ‘one physician, of flesh and of spirit, generate and ingenerate, God in man, true life in death, Son of Mary and Son of God, first passible and then impassible, Jesus Christ our Lord’.8 According to the flesh he was of the seed of David, but he is both Son of man and Son of God.® The contrast between ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’, which we shall notice more fully in later writings, is virtually synonymous with a contrast between ‘humanity’ and ‘deity’. Thus Ignatius says that the risen Christ ate and drank with his disciples as one with them in the flesh though in the spirit he was united with the Father.10 So far as the deity of Christ is concerned, Ignatius insists on his personal pre-existence, and, in the Johannine manner, on his con¬ tinuous existence with the Father: ‘Christ, who came forth from one Father and is with one, and departed to one.’11 Similar language to that of Ignatius is used by II Clement: ‘The Lord who saved us, being first spirit, then became flesh and so called us.’12 Christ is to be regarded as God.13 For the writer of the Epistle of Barnabas Christ is the Son of God who was manifested in flesh in order to communicate his revelation to those who could not look at deity unveiled any more than men can look directly at the sun.14 Barnabas 1 Eph. 9. 2 Magn. 8.

(The variant reading ‘eternal Word that did not proceed from silence’ is probably a correction made in the interests of the later orthodox doctrine of the eternal generation of the Logos.) 3 Eph. 3. 4 Rom. 8. 5 Eph. proem.; 18. 6 Rom. 6. 7 Eph. 20 and probably Rom. 8 Eph. 7.

9 ib. 20.

10 11 12

13 14

Smyrn. 3. Magn. 7. 2 Clem. 9.

ib. 1.

Barn.

5.

4.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

27

also attributes the words ‘Let us make man’ (Gen. 1:26) to the Father’s address to the pre-existent Son, conceived of as a distinct hypostasis. Although it is true that there is a common tendency among these writers to use the term ‘spirit’ somewhat vaguely to denote ‘deity’, the case is somewhat different with Hermas, for in the Shepherd he does appear to identify the Son or Word of God with the Holy Spirit, taking the latter to be the divine principle in the incarnate Christ: an identification which could be readily made under the influence of the Wisdom literature. Thus, ‘the holy pre-existent Spirit which created the whole creation God made to dwell in flesh that he desired. This flesh therefore in which the Holy Spirit dwelt was subject to the Spirit . . . He chose this flesh as a partner with the Holy Spirit.’1 Elsewhere Hermas speaks of the Holy Spirit as the Son of God;2 but in this very imprecise writing it is hard to know how much developed content is being given to a term such as ‘Holy Spirit’. The contribution of the Apostolic Fathers to the interpretation of the work of Christ is not of any great significance. On the whole they are content to repeat traditional phraseology without doing much to elucidate it, and this is largely due to the fact that their allusions are mainly in the nature of obiter dicta. The greatest stress is usually laid on the work of Christ as the bringer to men of illumination, knowledge, truth and life, these ideas being probably connected with the baptismal catechesis, for much incidental light is thrown by these writers upon the central importance of baptism in the early community: the seal with which believers are marked out as God’s people, the way of death to sin and demons and of rebirth to resurrectionlife, the new' white robe which must be preserved undefiled, the shield of Christ’s soldier, the sacrament of the reception of the Holy Spirit.3 For Ignatius, however, the death of Christ is linked with his own approaching martyrdom, and his thought is centred upon union with Christ in suffering; the hope is for life through the ‘blood of God’.4 Barnabas lays rather more stress on the sacrificial significance of Christ’s death, as the antitype of the offering of Isaac, and also on the idea of cleansing from sin through the blood of Christ.6 But these incidental allusions do not carry thought on this subject forward beyond the positions arrived at within the New Testament canon, except for the strong connection established by Ignatius between the redemptive death and resurrection of Christ and the Christian eucharist. The eucharist ‘is the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which flesh suffered for our sins and which the Father raised up’;6 it is mystically interpreted as ‘the bread of God which is the flesh of Christ who was of the seed of David’ and ‘his blood which is incorruptible love’;7 and it is, in a famous phrase, ‘the medicine of immortality, the antidote that we should not die but live for ever in Jesus Christ’.8 1 3 3 4 5 6 7 8

sim. 5.6. ib. 9.1. e.g., 2 Clem. Eph. 1 Barn. 5. Smyrn. 6. Rom. 7. Eph. 20.

7, 8;

Herm. sim.

8.2; 8.6; 9.16; Ign.

Polyc.

6;

Barn.

11.

28

A History of Christian Doctrine

The pace of doctrinal formulation was quickened during the second century by the clash of conflicting systems which derived their beliefs in part, at least, from outside the main Christian tradition represented by the New Testament writings. Much of the advance in Christian self-understand¬ ing in the period which separates the Apostolic Fathers from the theologians of the third century was due to the need to examine and to evaluate, and often refute and replace with a more satisfactory theology, the ideas propagated by a series of teachers, many of whom visited or settled in Rome, which became the most lively centre of debate. One of these systems of thought, Ebionism, had little importance, for it proved at an early date to be a dead-end and was significant in later times chiefly as an opprobrious tag to be fastened upon unpopular C-hristologies, such as those of Paul of Samosata or even, surprisingly, Arius. The Ebionites were a remnant of-Jewish Christianity, who, according to the third- and fourth-century accounts offered by Origen and Epiphanius,1 interpreted Christ in terms of prophet and Messiah, continued to observe the Law, rejected St. Paul, believed that Christ’s baptism meant the union of a heavenly being with a human Jesus, and were divided on the question of the virgin birth, the majority however affirming it. They were said to use as their authority only the Gospel according to the Hebrews, which Epiphanius believed to have been really a form of Matthew; and, according to Jerome,2 they tried to be both Jews and Christians but succeeded in being neither. Far more important as a catalyst in the formulation of Christian doctrine were the Gnostic movements of the second century. Gnosticism is a many¬ headed and many-sided phenomenon in ancient religion, with roots that go back into pre-Christian Hellenism, Judaism and oriental religion, and which therefore affected New Testament thought itself; but in the developed form in which it is proper to speak of Gnosticism as a coherent and recog¬ nizable pattern of belief, as opposed to a vaguer ‘gnosis’ or ‘Gnostic tendencies’, it belongs to the thought-world in which Hellenistic Judaism, Christianity, Greek theology and eastern influences were becoming fused together and producing a wide variety of systems of thought, through some very notable thinkers such as Valentinus, Basilides, and the authors of the Gnostic literature recently made known through the publication of the discoveries at Nag Hammadi.3 The salient elements in these systems which make it possible, in spite of their variety, to speak of them collectively as ‘Gnostic’ are as follows. There is a general and predominant interest in cosmology as a road towards the solution of the problem of evil. This leads to an insistence on the transcendence and utter remoteness of the ultimate divine principle, between whom (or which, for this principle can be desig¬ nated only by an abstraction such as ‘Depth’) and the universe there is postulated a series of emanations or aeons. The concept of these is linked 1 Or. Cels. 2.1; 5.65; comm, in Mt. 16:12; Epiph. haer. 30. 2 ep. 112. 3 R. M. Grant: Gnosticism and Early Christianity, Gnosticism - an Anthology, R. McL. Wilson: The Gnostic Problem; Werner Foerster (ed.): Gnosis (Vol. I Patristic material, Vol. II Coptic and Mandaean sources).

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

29

with astronomy and the idea of a series of heavens with their respective planets. The totality of aeons, in the systems of Valentinus and Basilides, forms the pleroma, the world of the divine which is superterrestrial and spiritual. Through some error of ‘fall’ on the part of a heavenly aeon, variously pictured in Gnostic mythologies, the creation of the material world has come about. It is not the work of God, but is due to some cosmic catastrophe, and it is under the rule of a power hostile to the divine good¬ ness. Nevertheless in man (or some men, for these systems tend to think of men as predetermined in their nature and only of an elite minority as capable of spiritual as opposed to physical and ‘psychic’ life), a spark or element of the divine pleroma has been preserved. The ‘spiritual’ man has something in him that is akin to God, though in this material world it is imprisoned and subject to ignorance and error and demonic oppression. Salvation is mediated by a saviour from the divine sphere who descends in order to impart the knowledge that brings release to the spiritual element in men. This knowledge is knowledge of the truth about oneself and one’s situation in relation to the world and to one’s heavenly origin. By this one can be assured of enlightenment and consequently of present liberation and future ascent to the pleroma when the body has been cast off at death.1 These systems are the main reason why Christian thought felt itself challenged in the century after the Apostolic Fathers at least as strongly in respect of its primary belief in God the Creator as of its faith in Christ. Hence the immense emphasis laid by early theologians on the goodness of God and the identity of the good God with the Creator of this material world. For another powerful attack on this faith was mounted by Marcion, whose conclusions were in many respects similar to those of the Gnostics though he arrived at them by a different approach. His starting-point, it is true, was, like theirs, the problem of evil; but he did not approach his attempt to solve it by way of cosmology. Nor did he share the usual Gnostic ideas that the soul is consubstantial with the divine, that salvation is by knowledge as opposed to faith, that men are predetermined to the categories of physical, psychical and spiritual, or that the work of the redeemer is to reintegrate the spirit of man with the divine element from which it came. The problem presents itself to him in terms of the Bible. The New Testament contradicts the Old. Hence there must be two gods, one being the god of the Old Testament, who is the creator and who stands in opposition to the true God. The Old Testament deity, who is just but not good, a deity of Law but not of Gospel, with his Christ, the Messiah promised in the Old Testament, is revealed as an enemy by the true Christ, the Christ of the good and loving God of the New Testament. For this revelation a true incarnation is both unnecessary (all that is needed is a divine messenger) and disgusting, for a divine redeemer from the evil world could not himself participate in materiality. The way of salvation is faith in Christ and in the true God whom he discloses, and purgation from the world of the hostile god by asceticism and renunciation. It is against the background of Gnosticism and Marcionism that we have to consider the Christian writings of the later second century. 1 cf. Iren, haer, 1.5.1, 5; Heracleon ap. Or. Jn. 13-25-

II THE GREEK APOLOGISTS It would not be wholly untrue to say that systematic Christian theology begins with the work of the Greek Apologists of the second century. Unlike the occasional writings, evoked by situations arising within the Christian community, which have survived from the period of the ‘Apostolic Fathers', the apologetic works of Aristides, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Tatian and Theophilus of Antioch, though differing considerably from one another in scope and length, have as their common object the defence of Christianity against the objections raised by intelligent contemporaries in the GrecoRoman world, especially the charge that Christians are ‘atheists’ and there¬ fore a subversive influence. They seek, accordingly, to commend their faith in terms acceptable to the serious Greco-Roman enquirer, and this involves them in an attempt to examine and to articulate the fundamental beliefs which, as Christians, they profess. No such thorough attempt to analyse and interpret the significance of Christian faith had hitherto been made. This does not mean that the Apologists were radical innovators in theology. The main lines of their defence of Christianity and their com¬ mendation of it to the world of their time (which for Justin, in his Dialogue with Trypho, included Judaism as well as the Hellenism to which most of these apologetic writings are directed) had already been adumbrated, more especially in the New Testament books themselves. A two-pronged apolo¬ getic is already sketched out in the Acts of the Apostles. To the Jewish world Christianity is there presented as the true Judaism: the authentic and predestined fulfilment of God’s revelation to Israel, demonstrated as such by the prophetic scriptures of the Old Testament when these are rightly understood. The Gentile world is at the same time asked to recognize that Christianity is ‘as old as the Creation’. Rightly understood, the realm of nature points to the Christian God, just as the prophets pointed to the climax of his work in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. Hence in the Acts of the Apostles Paul can be represented both as the ideal Pharisee who finds in Christianity the proper fulfilment of all that was good in his ancestral tradition1 and can therefore appeal confidently to the Jewish scriptures to vindicate his belief, and also as the exponent of a philosophical monotheism who can appeal for confirmation of his preaching to the utterances of the Greek poets.2 This double claim, that Christianity is the truth to which both the scriptures and the insights of the philosophers 1 Acts 26:5ff. * Acts 17:28.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

31

directly lead, is a starting-point for the arguments of the Apologists; but they develop its implications and they provide it with a theological rationale. This was found in the idea that the divine Logos, the uttered and self¬ communicating reason of God, spoke through the prophets and was the subject of the theophanies recorded in the Old Testament in which men had found themselves encountered and addressed by the divine presence; and, at the same time, the Logos who is Christ is none other than the 'Reason’ in which all men participate. Justin can thus adapt the Stoic theory of the immanent rationality by virtue of which the world is an ordered cosmos, and in harmony with which all wise and virtuous men must seek to live, so as to support his contention, not merely that Christianity is the proper fulfilment of the insights and aspirations of revealed (Hebraic) and natural (Greek philosophical) religion, but that all ‘those who have lived “with Logos” are Christians even though they may have been considered to be “atheists”, such as Socrates and Heraclitus among the Greeks and Abraham and Elijah among “barbarians” '.1 The wording of this passage is itself a vivid illustration of the lengths to which the Apologists were pre¬ pared to go in translating an originally Palestinian-Jewish faith into terms intelligible to the world of sophisticated Hellenism. This Logos is the ‘seminal’ or ‘germinal’ Logos which is implanted in men and enables them, albeit in incomplete and fragmentary fashion, to receive God’s self-communication and to know something of him. Those who responded rightly to the potentialities for communion with God which had thus been built into their rational nature could be reckoned among Christians, so that ‘whatever among all men has been well said belongs to us Christians’.2 Because of this seed of the Logos implanted in all men the ethical precepts of Stoic philosophy are recognizably akin to the teachings of Christianity, so much so, in fact, that the demons who persecuted Christians have always tried to stir up hatred against those who live according to reason (i.e. Logos), including Heraclitus in the past and the Stoic philosopher Musonius, put to death in more recent times.3 Neverthe¬ less, the indwelling of the Logos in all good and wise men was only partial and fragmentary. The seed was there,4 but it afforded only an indistinct and incomplete apprehension of the truth. Christianity brings men into an encounter with the actual source and ground of these partial apprehensions, for Christ is himself the Logos of God who is self-existent, uncreated and ineffable. He is the Logos of God, who became man for our sake and not only disclosed the truth which had been dimly discernible but also became a participant in our sufferings and brought us healing.5 Justin lays most stress, however, on the work of the Logos as revealer. The partial character of the philosophers’ discernment of the truth produced the inconsistencies and disputes which are inherent in their systems (a point which Tatian develops in a contemptuous attack on the philosophical schools). Christ, on 1 2 3 4 6

1 apol. 2 apol. ib. 8. / apol. 2 apol.

46. 13. 32. 13.

N>

32

A History of Christian Doctrine

the other hand, is himself ‘the whole Logos’, or the ‘Whole of what is rational’, and the revelation which he has brought is not confined to an intellectual elite; it is embraced, to the point of martyrdom, by ordinary uneducated people.1 The identification of Christ with the divine Logos thus served to unite, and to give theological backing to, the old claim of Christianity to be faith in one who was both the glory of Israel and a light to the Gentiles. It had, however, more important functions to fulfil in this attempt to give a coherent and persuasive account of Christian belief. It served to bridge the gulf between God and the world; for God is unoriginate (or ingenerate: agennetos), nameless because indefinable and incomprehensible, unchange¬ able and eternal.2 God, according to Greek theology, is everything which the finite world is not; it is variable, manifold, ever changing, subject in every part to the continuous process of coming into being, developing, decaying and ceasing to be, but God is absolutely simple, uncompounded, perfect and therefore incapable of any change but eternally constant and immutable, impassible, utterly remote from all process. Athenagoras con¬ trasts the eternity of the unoriginate deity with the perishability and muta¬ bility of originate matter, and speaks of the great gulf which divides matter from God.3 Theophilus uses similar language,4 and these ideas are common¬ place among all the theologians of this period. How, then, can God be related to the world of matter without himself being changed through being related to the sphere of change? It is this apparently insoluble problem which the Apologists, following lines already indicated in the Wisdom literature and in the New Testament, sought to overcome by means of the concept of the Logos. God is the unchanging, invisible, sovereign Creator. Aristides speaks of him in this way at the beginning of his Apology, and Theophilus, attacking pagan idolatry, opens his own apologetic work5 with a fine passage on the majesty and grandeur of God who is without beginning since he is uncreated, immutable since he is immortal, who cannot be described in terms of his essential being since he is incomprehensible, but only in terms of attributes. The biblical picture of the living God, active within his creation as well as transcending all things, is never forgotten by the Apologists. It is, in fact, combined by them in a remarkable fashion with the theology which they derive from the world of Greek thought. Thus they speak of God as Father, using the familiar New Testament image; but they tend like Clement (see above, p. 24) to associate his Fatherhood with creativity in a way that is foreign to the New Testament writings but has important precedents in Plato.6 God is the Maker and Father of the universe;7 he is Father inasmuch as he is Creator. Nevertheless God is concerned with his creatures and active in effecting their salvation in a way which is wholly in accordance with the 1 2 3 4 5 8 7

ib. 10. 1 apol. 14, 10, 61; 2 apol. 6; 1 apol. 13. Athenag. leg. 4. Thphl. Autol. 1.5. ib. 1.iff. e.g. Tim. 28C, Rep. 506E. Just. dial. 7, 56, 60, etc.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

33

biblical presentation of his work but which is by no means easy to reconcile with the philosophical presuppositions of the Apologists’ own theology. Their solution of the difficulty is to assert that in the work of creation the Logos is God’s instrument. In their doctrine of creation the Apologists are, of course, taking up the thought both of the Johannine Prologue and of the Psalmist’s ‘By the word of the Lord were the heavens made’ (Ps. 33:6), as well as the Wisdom-WordSpirit theology of the Wisdom literature. They read these texts in the light of Platonic and Stoic thought, and especially of Philo’s developed doctrine of the Logos as the mediator of divine creativity, providential care and revelation. This enables Philo to ascribe the creative activity of God and his immanence in the world of his creation, not, indeed, to another and inferior deity, still less to a divine power opposed, like Marcion’s creator, to the true and supreme God (Justin is prepared to find Plato a useful ally against Marcion), but to one who, while not different from God, is dis¬ tinguished from God the Father in ‘number’. This distinction made it possible for early Christian theology to adopt the Hellenistic concepts of the divine, and indeed to employ them as presuppositions, without surren¬ dering the essential Hebraic and Christian faith in God as creator, living God, saviour, and all else that belonged to the scriptural testimony. It also enabled the Apologists to ascribe the apparent localization of God and other anthropomorphic presentations of the divine activity in the Old Testament to one who is distinct from the Maker of the universe himself. Thus in a discussion of the exegesis of the story of the burning bush in his Dialogue with Trypho1 Justin says that the appearance of God to Moses, declaring himself to be the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, was not an appearance of the maker of the universe but rather of him who had appeared to Abraham and to Jacob in the theophanies recorded in their histories: that is, of the minister of the maker of all things, the Logos. No one with any sense, Justin continues, could suppose that the Maker and Father would leave the supracelestial sphere and become visible in a tiny bit of the world. Plenty of scriptural texts were available to support the doctrine of the mediation of the Logos. Justin undertakes to prove to Trypho from the scriptures that he who appeared to Abraham and Jacob and Moses and is called by the biblical writer God is other than God the creator of the universe: ‘other’, as he immediately goes on to explain, in number but not in the intention with which he acts, for he has never done anything but that which the supreme God who made the world has himself willed to do.2 Such a text as Gen. 19:24, ‘The Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah sulphur and fire from the Lord out of heaven’, suggested that the Lord had a heavenly companion, also called ‘the Lord’. Still more apt were passages such as Gen. 1:26 where, in saying ‘Let us make . . .’, God is apparently addressing this companion.3 The existence of this ministering agent together with God the Father and Creator was proved even more clearly by the passages in which personified Wisdom speaks of being created to carry out 1 2 3

ib. ib. ib.

60. 57. 62.

V

34

A History of Christian Doctrine

the work of God in the creation of the world; the most notable of these texts, one which was to have a long history in Trinitarian controversies, was Proverbs 8:22, ‘The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways for his works. Before the ages he established me, in the beginning, before he made the earth . . .k1 To the Apologists these scriptural evidences pointed to the distinction between the Creator and the mediating Logos and showed that this dis¬ tinction had existed before all creation. God, indeed, was never without his Logos, for he could not be without reason; and the Apologists regard this relationship as having always implied real distinction. As Logos this ‘other’ is properly called ‘Son’, being Logos and ‘firstborn’ and ‘power’.2 Before Creation he was present with the Maker and Father, being begotten by him before everything and addressed by him (Gen. 1:26) before he acted as his agent in the making of the world.3 Tatian offers a somewhat clearer picture than Justin of a first and second stage, as it were, in the existence of the Logos. From eternity the Logos was present with God, immanent in him as the creative reason may be said to be immanent in a man. It was, as it were, a potential capacity for creating, and at the moment of creation this was actualized; the Logos was put forth to be the agent of the making and sustaining of the whole created order.4 This thought is developed by Athenagoras, who calls the Son God’s Logos in idea and in actuality, describes him as ‘mind and Logos’ (meaning that he is God’s reason both as immanent and as expressed), and points out that the Logos cannot be said to have been brought into existence, since God is eternally possessed of reason and always had his Logos in himself, but that for the purpose of Creation the Logos came forth to operate powerfully in an external relation¬ ship towards the creatures who were brought into being through him.5 Theophilus expresses the same idea with the aid of language derived from Stoicism. He distinguishes between the two stages of the existence of the Logos, applying to the former stage the term endiathetos (‘immanent’) and to the latter prophorikos (‘projected’ or ‘put forth’), saying that the Logos who has always been the mind and thought of God was begotten (and in this sense is the ‘first-begotten of all creation’) as the agent of Creation, continuing to consort with him inseparably, though as it were externally.6 This act of ‘putting forth’ or ‘generation’ by which the immanent divine reason comes to be distinguished as Son, and as the intermediary agent of the immutable Creator towards the world of coming into being and perish¬ ing, is purposive. It is by the Father’s will that the Logos is ‘generated’ as the personal creative power of God. Justin tells Trypho7 that God begat before all creatures a rational power out of himself which can, in scriptural language, be called the ‘glory of the Lord' or 'Son' or ‘Wisdom’, or ‘Angel’ or ‘God’ or ‘Lord and Word’ or ‘captain of the host’ (this last being an 1 2

3 4

5 9 7

ib. 129, etc. 1 apol. 23. 2 apol. 6, dial. 62. orat. 7. leg. 10. Autol. 2.22, cf. 2.10. dial. 61.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

35

allusion to the theophany to Joshua (5:13) and an indication how closely related were the concepts of ‘Logos’ and ‘angel’, especially the angel Michael). All these appellations signify his function of ministering to the will of the Father and his being begotten by the Father’s will. Later in the Dialogue Justin again insists, in order to emphasize the distinct existence of the Logos, that ‘power was begotten from the Father by his power and will’.1 This point receives similar emphasis in Tatian2 and Theophilus. The latter pictures the Logos as God's counsellor before Creation began, being his mind and intelligence. Then, when God had determined to make the world, he begat this Logos ‘externally projected’ as the firstborn of all creation, and Theophilus is careful to point out that this emission of the immanent Logos did not mean that God was thereby deprived of Logos; rather, the Logos was externalized by the deliberate and purposeful act of the Father. The idea of this ‘generation’ is similar to Philo’s conception of the Logos as first the plan or blueprint, as it were, for creation: the ‘intel¬ ligible world’ pre-existent in the mind of the Designer, which, when the Designer wills to translate his idea into concrete actuality, can be said to come forth and, as having an independent subsistence of its own, be termed the creative agent.3 In the period of the Arian controversy this insistence upon the generation of the Logos as a deliberately-willed act of the Father was to cause difficulty, for it then seemed to imply a degree of otherness and subordination which suggested a dangerously close relationship between the divine Logos and creatures. The Apologists, however, are simply anxious, like all pre-Nicene writers in the main Christian tradition, to express the need to clarify the distinction in God which their basic theology required. Various attempts were made by these authors to state what they meant by the ‘generation’ of the Logos. Sometimes an analogy is drawn from the utterance of human speech, taking ‘Logos’ in the sense of ‘communicating word’. ‘When we utter a word,’ says Justin, ‘we beget a word, not by an act of division which would diminish the logos (i.e. reason) within us, but putting it forth without “abscission”.’4 5 The same illustration is used by Tatian and Theophilus, and by later theologians such as Tertullian, but it is deprecated by Irenaeus and Clement; it certainly suggests a different idea of the Logos, as God’s communicating utterance, from that of a personal cosmic mediator which was what the Apologists required. Other analogies appeared more appropriate, especially that of fire. The picture of one fire, or torch, kindled from another served to establish the truth that the Logos is a distinct entity ‘in number’, but at the same time to show that the emission of the Logos is a distinct entity involves no such division or ‘abscission’ as would diminish the rationality of God.6 This illustration, and that of the relation of the ray of light to the sun, a relation of identity and of distinction, are used by Justin to explain both that the begetting of the 1 2 3 4 5

ib. 128. or at. 5. opif. mund. 4-5, legg. alleg. dial. 61. ib., Tat. orat. 5.

1.8-9, etc.

36

A History of Christian Doctrine

Logos involves no division of the substance (ousia) of the Father and also that the distinction is numerical only.1 This is the other side of the Apologists’ theological problem. If it was essential to make the distinction, it was also vitally important to preserve monotheism and avoid the possibility that the insistence on the mediating role of the Logos should not lead to a belief in two deities, such as might almost be suspected from Justin’s statement that Christians hold the Son of God ‘in second place’ after the immutable and eternal God himself (though in fact Justin is here concerned only to demonstrate that it is not a ‘crucified man’ to whom this place is assigned but the actual Son).2 It is in order to lay stress on the essential identity of the Logos with the Father that the biblical language of ‘Son’ or ‘Child’ is used of the Logos3 and he is spoken of as ‘offspring’ by generation, as contrasted with ‘creature’.4 Besides serving to unite God immanent with God transcendent and to bridge the gulf between the unchanging God and the created order, the concept of the Logos obviously helped to rebut the assertions of the pagan world that the object of Christian adoration was a man. Yet the Apologists made no important contribution to Christology. They assume an actual identity of the Logos and Jesus Christ. The Logos had been manifested in various forms in the Old Testament theophanies, such as the fire of the burning bush; but this Logos could be called, even in that pre-Christian context, Jesus the Christ, God’s son and ‘apostle’,5 and it is this same being who ‘being formerly Logos, has now by God’s will been made man for the sake of the race of men’. ‘By God's Word Jesus Christ our Saviour possessed flesh and blood for our salvation.’6 At one point Justin goes a little further and says that the whole rational principle of God became Christ, ‘body and logos (or Logos) and soul’.7 This may mean that Justin thinks of man as a being compounded of body, soul or life-principle, and rational mind, and that the Logos became man in this full sense. This is likely to be the right interpretation, though conceivably Justin could mean that the Logos be¬ came Christ, a man consisting of body, life-principle, and divine Logos which in him took the place of the human intellect. In any case, Justin believes that all men, in so far as they are genuinely rational, partake of, or live with, the Logos, and he is showing that whereas the indwelling of the Logos in all other men is partial, Christ is the totality of the Logos. But Justin unfortunately does not develop any theory of the relationship between the Incarnation and the participation of all rational men in the Logos. Nor do the Apologists contribute in any important way to the early Christian understanding of Christ’s saving work. In the thought of the Apologists the Holy Spirit plays a relatively indistinct role, as indeed might be expected from theologians who developed the doctrine of the Logos as they did. Usually the Spirit is characterized as 1 2 3 4 5

9 7

dial. 128. 1 apcl. 13. dial. 105, 125. 1 apol. 21, dial. 1 apol. 63. ib. 66. 2 apol. 10.

62.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

37

‘prophetic’, and it is as the Spirit of prophecy and scriptural revelation that Justin declares that Christians honour the Spirit in the ‘third rank’ after the Creator and the Logos.1 Whereas, however, Greek philosophy offered plenty of support for the Apologists’ doctrine of the Logos, they found it hard to find points of contact between the biblical concepts of the Spirit and the theology of the Greek world. Justin, who believed that Plato had actually read the books of Moses, concludes that the obscure allusion to a ‘third’ which he found in pseudo-Plato, epistle 2, 312E, conceals a reference to the Spirit who moved over the waters at the Creation,2 and he finds a perversion of the same idea of the Spirit’s work in Creation expressed in the pagan practice of erecting statues of Kore at springs of water.3 These far¬ fetched allusions, however, indicate that the Spirit played no important part in Justin’s thought, and for the most part his references to the Spirit show that he was merely repeating the conventional language of Christian piety and liturgy, particularly in respect of the rite of baptism, administered in the name of the Father of the universe (this phrase is a striking example of Justin’s assimilation of traditional Christian concepts to Greek theology), our saviour Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.4 Tatian does indeed believe that the salvation of believers is the work of the divine Spirit. The human spirit is raised to the heavenly sphere by becoming united with the Spirit of God. This ‘Spirit’, however, is not distinguished from the Logos;5 the long and ultimately self-defeating attempt of patristic theology to assign separate and distinct roles in creation and redemption to the Logos/Son and to the Holy Spirit had scarcely yet begun. Tatian and Athenagoras, like Justin, lay stress on the prophetic function of the Spirit, and the latter goes further than the other Apologists in attempting to picture the relation of the Spirit to God: the Spirit is an effluence (aporrhoia) from God, issuing from and returning to him like the sun’s rays.6 This analogy is derived from the Book of Wisdom, and could be employed either of the Son, as in the Epistle to the Hebrews, or of the Spirit with whom, as the Book of Wisdom itself suggested, the divine hypostatized Wisdom could equally be identified. Theophilus, in the first instance of the Christian use of the term ‘Trinity’ (trias), enumerates ‘Father’, ‘Logos' and ‘Wisdom’.7 In fact it is always difficult, and in the last resort it proves to be impossible, to draw a real distinction between ‘Logos' and ‘Spirit’, and the Apologists found it especially hard even to attempt to do this because of the very extensive use which they made of the concept of ‘Logos’. The functions of each are interchangeable, so that Spirit and Logos can both be regarded as the source of the prophets' inspiration, and the Spirit who overshadowed Mary (Luke 1:35) is identified by Justin, as by other early theologians, with the Logos.8 1 apol. 6, 13. 2 ib. 60. 3 ib. 64. 4 ib. 61. 5 Tat. orat. 7, 13. 8 ib. 13; Athenag. leg. 7 Autol. 2.15. 8 1 apol. 33. 1

7, 10.

V

38

A History of Christian Doctrine

To some extent this apparent lack of definition in the Apologists' thought about the ‘third’ is due to the continuing use of the word ‘spirit’ in the sense of ‘deity’. God is ‘spirit’, and the meaning of this term has to be carefully distinguished from the Stoic conception of a wholly immanent spirit per¬ vading the cosmos: Christ, too, as divine, is ‘spirit’, and Theophilus speaks of the Logos as ‘Spirit of God, Wisdom and Power of the Most High, who came down upon the prophets and through them spoke of the making of the world’.1 This last passage shows how easily the use of ‘spirit’ as virtually synonymous with ‘deity’ passes over into a real identification of the Holy Spirit with the Logos, as we have already noticed in the case of Tatian. Despite these instances of seeming confusion, however, the achievement of the Apologists in laying the foundation of Trinitarian theology and enabling Christian faith to come to terms with Greek philosophical presuppositions was altogether remarkable. The defects of their theology, which gradually became apparent, were probably inevitable, given the nature of the task which they undertook, and are not the fault of the Apologists themselves in setting about that task in their particular fashion. In contrast with the originality of their synthesis of biblical and philo¬ sophical ideas about God and creation the Apologists add little to the traditional Christian thought concerning man’s sin and the meaning of salvation. Like all apologists in the Hellenistic world, Justin has to lay great stress on the freedom of the human will as against pagan notions of fate. This emphasis leads to an insistence upon divine judgement, rewards and punishments, and causes Justin to go out of his way to explain that the foreknowledge possessed by the prophets implies no doctrine of deter¬ minism but only that God foresees the course which men will freely choose.2 Sin is thus due to man’s misuse of freedom, but it is also to be ascribed to the malevolent tyranny of demons over the human race,3 from which Christ set men free.4 The main emphasis in the Apologists is upon the responsibility of man himself for the state of sin and servitude which has been his lot since the primary act of disobedience by Adam. In this connection it is interesting to observe that Theophilus interprets the primal condition of Adam as being childlike. Adam was capable of developing either for good or for ill; he might achieve immortality or incur mortality, and it was on account of his ‘infantile’ condition that God forbade him to eat of the tree of knowledge which would have been beyond his undeveloped capacities. The expulsion from paradise was in a sense remedial; it offered man the chance, through the divine gift of the Law, of freely repenting and so attaining to incorruptibility.5 Very little, however, is said by these authors about the nature of the redemptive work of Christ. There is fairly frequent repetition of stock New Testament themes, but these are not developed. There is also a fairly extensive typology of the Cross, the wood of which was, for instance, 1 Athenag. a

5

orat. 4; ib. 2 apol. 7.

16; Tat.

1 apol. 43, 44, 61; apol. 5; 2 apol. 5. dial. 41, 94. Autol. 2.24-27.

3 / 4

leg.

7; Thphl.

Autol.

2.10.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

39

foreshadowed in the ark of Noah,1 but there is little distinctive teaching about Christ’s death; the work of the Logos in bringing men to salvation is chiefly to illuminate and instruct. Illumination, together with forgiveness of sins, is the chief effect of the baptismal washing which Justin is the first writer to describe in detail,2 to which Theophilus adds a special emphasis on baptismal rebirth and recreation.3 Where the soteriological significance of Christ's death, as opposed to the teaching function of the Logos, is most clearly brought out is in Justin’s account of the Christian eucharist. In accordance with Christ’s commandment the memorial of his Passion is made with bread and wine, realistically identified with his body and blood, and it is in the context of this commemoration that the worshippers offer their thanksgiving.4 The outcome of redemption is pictured, especially by Justin, in highly concrete terms. At this point the Apologists have to defend an Hebraic belief against the Hellenism which in so many aspects of their theology they were able to claim as an ally. They are greatly concerned to assert their faith in a physical resurrection, for the body as well as the soul must share in the future life for which man is intended by the Creator.5 They are anxious to maintain the belief in man’s creation by a decisive act of God in contrast to the Platonist view that the soul is inherently immortal, having pre-existed from eternity and being destined to live after death.6 They also want to preserve the biblical idea of final judgement, reward and punish¬ ment, for which, indeed, they could cite Plato and the poets.7 All this leads them to argue for a resurrection of the flesh, contending that this is no more miraculous than the manner of our conception and birth. Justin adds to this literalistic interpretation of New Testament eschatology the millenarian belief in an earthly reign of the saints with Christ which was, as Justin knew, rejected by many who were unquestionably good Christians, but which he believed to be necessitated by the Scriptural evidence.8

1 dial. 138. 2 1 apol. 61. 3 Autol. 2.16. 4 i apol. 65, 66. It is on the whole improbable that Justin interpreted the word poiein (do) in the Words of Institution as meaning ‘sacrifice’: see 1 apol. 66, dial. 41. 5 Athenag. res. i8ff. * Just. dial. 5. 7 / apol. 8; Thphl. Autol. 2.37-38. 8 dial. 80.

Ill MELITO AND IRENAEUS Among the Greek Apologists there could be included Melito, bishop of Sardis in Asia, who wrote an apology, of which fragments survive, addressed to Marcus Aurelius. He must, however, have also been a prominent leader of the Church in Asia and a theologian of broad interests who exercised a considerable influence on the general development of Christian thought. During the last decade of the second century his name is mentioned by Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, in a letter to Victor, bishop of Rome, as one of the ‘great luminaries' in the firmament of Asian Christianity.1 The context of this reference to Melito is the dispute between Rome and the churches of Asia over the date of Easter. This so-called ‘Quartodeciman’ controversy revolved round the question whether Easter should be observed at the actual time of the Passover, the preparatory fast thus ending on the fourteenth of the Jewish month Nisan, without regard to the day of the week on which this might fall, or whether the practice of commemorating the Resurrection on the first day of the week should be applied to the annual as well as the weekly festival of the Resurrection, and Easter be kept on the Sunday following the Passover time. In this quarrel Rome and most other churches followed the latter practice, which became universal. Asia, however, claimed to possess equally good apostolic authority for the former, and could point to the Johannine chronology of the Passion, and to St. Paul’s identification of Christ with the Passover lamb, in support of its tradition. The long list of Melito's writings includes what seems to have been the first systematic treatise on the Incarnation. Little of his large output survives apart from a homily on the Passover which is generally held to be authentic. It exhibits that elaborately rhetorical style for which, according to Jerome, Melito incurred the disapproval of Tertullian, whose theology he nevertheless seems to have influenced. This work is important as an ex¬ ample of typological exegesis and very possibly as a Christian version of the Jewish Passover haggadah; it certainly throws light on the early Christian interpretation of the Passover sacrifice and the Exodus as types of Christ’s work of deliverance, his death as a sacrifice, and the Church as the people of the covenant. Much of the homily is written in the form of hymnody, and it ends with a quasi-credal ascription of praise to Christ as ‘he who made the heaven and the earth . . . who is proclaimed through law and prophets, 1 Eus. h.e. 5.24.2.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

41

who was incarnate in a virgin, who was hung on a tree, who was buried . . . raised . . . and ascended, who sits at the right hand of the Father, who has power to judge and save, through whom the Father did his work from the beginning to eternity’.1 Creation, the theophames, and God’s acts in the history of Israel are ascribed to Christ who is identified typologically not only with the sacrificial lamb of the Passover but with the righteous sufferers: murdered Abel, Isaac who was bound, Jacob the exile, Joseph who was sold, Moses who was exposed as an infant, persecuted David. Christ is himself the Law.2 Like Ignatius, Melito glories in the paradox of the Incarnation: ‘God was slain’.3 This strong emphasis on the pre-existence and the deity of Christ is balanced by an equal stress on the distinctness of his divinity and his humanity. Like Irenaeus, Melito calls the former ‘God’ and the latter ‘the man’.4 ‘The Lamb,’ he says, ‘was buried as man and rose from the dead as God. He is father, inasmuch as he begets (sc. believers as sons of God), and Son, inasmuch as he is begotten’;6 ‘he took upon himself the sufferings of him (i.e. man) who suffers, through a body capable of suffering, and de¬ stroyed the passions of the flesh, and by the Spirit that could not die (i.e. his divinity) he slew death the man-slayer’.6 Indeed, if a fragment of Melito’s treatise on the Incarnation is genuine (some have suspected it to emanate from a much later anti-Apollinarian source), he anticipated later theology in his emphasis on the two natures of Christ, for which, like Tertullian who spoke of two substantiae (essences or substances),7 he uses the equivalent Greek term ousiai. Christ was at once God and perfect (i.e. complete) man. His human nature (physis) was real and no mere phantasm; it consisted of a soul as well as a body. Like Irenaeus, Tertullian, and in the fifth century the Antiochene theologians and Leo of Rome, Melito believed that the humanity and divinity of Christ operated almost independently of each other: in the thirty years preceding his baptism his humanity was revealed while the signs of his divinity were concealed; in the three years which followed it he disclosed his deity through working miracles.8 Melito thus seems to have gone considerably further in Christological speculation than the other Apologists. It is perhaps of some interest that he was a pioneer among Christian theologians in visiting Palestine, possibly as a pilgrim to the scenes of the Gospel, and ascertaining the Hebrew canon of scripture which he evidently regarded as an authoritative source of doctrine.® The curious assertion of Origen10 that Melito was among those who thought of God so anthropomorphically as to believe him to have physical eyes, ears, feet and so on, may rest on a misunderstanding of the pasch. 104. ib. 82, 83, 87, 69, 9. 8 ib. 96. 4 ib. 5. 5 ib. 8-9. 9 ib. 66. 7 earn. Christ. 18; Prax. 27. 8 frag. 6 (Perler, Sources chritiennes * Eus. h.e. 4.26.14. 10 sel. in Gen. 1:26. 1

2

123).

A History of Christian Doctrine

42

title of one of his books or possibly may have been inferred by Origen from what may well have been Melito’s literalistic eschatology. Irenaeus came from the same background, being a native of Smyrna, although he migrated to the West and became bishop of Lyons after the death of his predecessor, Pothinus, in the persecution of 177. He also was a prolific writer and of his work, too, relatively little survives, though far more than in the case of Melito. His chief writing, the treatise Against Heresies, is primarily directed against Valentinian Gnosticism in various forms, but, especially in the last three of its five books, it also contains much positive exposition of current orthodoxy. This is, in his view, based on the fourfold Gospel, which can be set over against the esoteric books which were claimed by the Gnostics as sources of teaching imparted secretly by the Lord to an inner group of privileged disciples, on the continuity of the succession of bishops in sees founded by apostles and the unbroken tradition of teaching which he believes to be guaranteed by the apostolic succession of bishops in the teaching chair of the local church, and on the rule of faith. Irenaeus refers to the ‘elders’ in the Church who, with the succession to the episcopate, have received a sure gift of truth (charisma veritatis certum),1 It seems improbable that, as has sometimes been suggested, Irenaeus means that the bishops who have taken up their office in due succession have been granted a special divine inspiration to teach the truth. The true faith is maintained, in his view, by the Church as a whole under the guidance of the Spirit; this is why he attaches so much importance to the witness to truth of the church at Rome, where not only is there to be found the one church of apostolic foundation in the West but also a doubly apostolic church founded by both the great apostles Peter and Paul, and where the truth may readily be ascertained because, as the capital city, Rome is the place where the whole Church is bound to meet together, the Church which consists of the faithful who, in every place, preserve the tradition that comes from the apostles.2 It seems, then, that Irenaeus thinks of the bishops, the official teachers of the community, as being both the repre¬ sentatives and spokesmen, and also the authorized defenders, of the apostolic tradition of belief which, unlike the Gnostic traditions which are reserved for a privileged elite, constantly circulates among the whole Christian community and is preserved and purified by a process of com¬ parison and interchange. If this is so, then the ‘sure gift of truth’ possessed by the bishops is probably not a special inspiration but the doctrinal tradition itself, which it is by no means inappropriate to call a charisma, a gift of the Spirit to the Church. The rule of faith, or canon of truth, is the third of Irenaeus’ norms of doctrine. He means by this (Irenaeus prefers the term ‘canon of truth'; Tertullian calls the same thing the ‘rule of faith’) a summary of the teaching given in the churches. It is not a formal creed, but is more flexible in its wording and somewhat fuller in content. It resembles the outlines of the kerygma, or apostolic preaching, which modern scholars have extracted from 1 2

haer. 4.26.2. ib. 3.24.1; 3.3.2.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

43

the New Testament writings. One version begins with an allusion to the dispersion of the Church over the whole world and asserts that nevertheless it has received from the apostles and their disciples faith in one God, Father almighty, who made the heaven and earth and seas and all things in them; and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, incarnate for our salvation, and in the Holy Spirit who through the prophets proclaimed the dispositions made by God for salvation, the advents of Christ, his birth of the Virgin, his suffering, his rising from the dead, his incarnate ascension into the heavens, and his appearance from the heavens in the glory of the Father to ‘re¬ capitulate’ all things and to raise up all flesh of all mankind, so that to Christ Jesus our Lord and God and Saviour and King, according to the good pleasure of the unseen Father, every knee may bow . . . and every tongue confess him and that he may give righteous judgment in all things, sending the spiritual forces of wickedness and the angels who have trans¬ gressed and the impious and unrighteous and lawless and blasphemous among men into eternal Are, and granting the gift of life and incorrupti¬ bility, and the promise of eternal glory, to the righteous and holy and those who have kept his commandments and persevered in his love, some from the beginning and some by the way of repentance.1 This is but one of a number of passages where Irenaeus quotes the ‘canon of truth’ at length. It represents a distillation of what the second-century church regarded as the central and essential burden of scripture. In its turn it could be used as a sort of key to the interpretation of scripture itself, and this was especially important at a time when the threat to traditional belief came not only from alleged secret and unwritten tradition handed down in esoteric groups and purporting to come from Christ and his dis¬ ciples but also from distorted exegesis of the canonical books themselves. It was as true in antiquity as always that everyone with sufficient ingenuity can read whatever he pleases out of the Bible. The ‘canon’ which Irenaeus is so fond of producing as a main weapon of orthodoxy was a way of preventing this from being done and maintaining that no system could rightly claim scriptural authority if it contravened this essentially scriptural ‘rule’. Irenaeus applied his criteria of truth in the first instance to the con¬ firmation of Christian faith in God as Creator. This lies at the heart of his teaching, since he develops his doctrine in reply to those who, like both the Gnostics and Marcion (from somewhat different presuppositions) wished to deny that the natural order is the work of God and to assert that in some sense salvation is to be understood as rescue from the natural, and evil, order. His starting-point, as he expressly states, is God the Creator (demiurge) who made heaven and earth and all things in them, and his object is to show that there is nothing above him or after him (that is, that there is no superior Power to the creator in a celestial hierarchy and no question of a good god intervening in history after another deity had created the material universe); and that he was not moved by anyone, but made all things by his own intent and freely, since he alone is God, the only Lord, only Creator, only Father, alone containing all things and causing 1 ib.

i.io.i.

A History of Christian Doctrine

44

them to exist.1 The alternative to the acceptance of belief in the one Creator is the chaos of polytheism; to maintain belief in a supreme Father but to ascribe creation to some other artificer or to angels is to imply that angels are more efficient than God, that God is negligent, or inferior or indifferent.2 God is the artificer of all things, as the wise architect and supreme king; and the teaching of Christ shows that there is one Father and maker of the world, who is none other than the God proclaimed by the Law and the Prophets.3 In accordance with this insistence on creation as the work of God, and God alone, Irenaeus strongly asserts the doctrine that God created out of nothing. Tatian had pointed out that God’s creative act included the creation of the matter from which the world was made,4 but Justin was not so clear on this point, and in certain passages5 he seems to keep closely to the Platonic picture, characteristic of the notion of creation set out in the Timaeus, of all things being formed out of undifferentiated matter which itself was pre-existent. For Irenaeus, at any rate, nothing whatever is excepted from the universal truth that all things have been made by the will and power of God. Men cannot, indeed, make anything out of nothing; they require some already existing material for their work, but God himself supplied the material for his workmanship when as yet it had no existence.6 The theme of creation is central in Irenaeus’ thought, not only in argument against Gnostics and Marcion but also in his positive expositions of Christian faith; thus his Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching begins with a declaration of belief in the uncreated and ingenerate God, the creator of all things, and points to God as the first cause from which all things in turn derive their being. Irenaeus follows fairly closely the general line of the Apologists’ attempt to reconcile the doctrines of creation and divine transcendence by means of a Logos theology. He does, however, introduce certain differences of emphasis. One, which is perhaps of no great significance since for him the two terms are plainly synonymous, is a tendency to use the word ‘Son’ as an equivalent for ‘Logos’ even when he is speaking of the eternal presence of the Word with the Father before his ‘externalization’ for the work of creation and redemption. He is anxious to make it clear that the Logos did not become Son of God by virtue of the Incarnation.7 This may conceivably indicate a tendency to think less distinctly than the Apologists of two clearly distinguished stages in the existence of the Logos, corresponding to the terms endiathetos and prophorikos, and an inclination to think of the Logos or Son as being eternally ‘with’ God and extrapolated, rather than as God’s internal reason ‘coming forth’. Certainly, Irenaeus dislikes the analogy, so often used by the Apologists, from the utterance of human speech. This seems to him to assimilate the putting forth of the Logos much too closely to the temporal act of speaking and to obscure the truth that 1 ib. 2.1.1. 2 ib. 2.2.I. 3 ib. 2.ii.i. 4

5

6

7

or at. e.g.,

haer. e.g.,

5.

1 apol.

10.

2.10.4.

ib.

3.17-4-

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

45

God is himself mind and reason and that his word is absolutely identical with his reason.1 He does not go so far as actually to repudiate the two-stage concept of the Logos as such, but he applies the text ‘Who shall declare his generation?’ (later to be greatly overworked during the Arian controversy) not only against the Gnostic inventors of genealogies of aeons but also against those more orthodox thinkers who venture to speculate about the generation of the Logos.2 It is through the Logos that God creates. Irenaeus, however, in contrast with the Apologists, links the Spirit with the Logos in his creative role. Not that he finds it easy to distinguish how Logos and Spirit respectively operate in the creative process. He can only suppose that the function of the former is to bring all things into being, and of the latter to bestow order and form on them.3 It seems that in this rather awkward doctrine he is trying, as he consistently does, to remain faithful to the witness of scripture. Many passages, especially of the Wisdom literature, appear to identify the Spirit with Wisdom (a point which Theophilus had taken) and to assign Wisdom-Spirit a pre-eminently important role in creation; and it was not realized that such texts should be understood as parallel, and not com¬ plementary, to the notion of the creative work of the Logos. The association of Logos and Spirit in Irenaeus does, however, produce some interesting consequences. One is his idea that Logos and Spirit are the two creative hands of God, a thought which may have been arrived at through reflection on the ‘moulding’ of Adam in the light of ‘Thy hands have made me’ (Ps. 119:73). It was to his ‘hands’ that God said ‘Let us make man’.4 By these hands, which had created Adam, Enoch and Elijah were translated, and Irenaeus, in pointing this out, has the future resurrection of believers in view.5 Irenaeus is always anxious to assert that it is the whole man, including his physical body, and not a part of him such as the rational soul alone, which was fashioned by God’s hands and will be perfected hereafter.6 This ingenious attempt to portray the co-operation of Logos and Spirit in the work of creation has the valuable effect of bringing the transcendent God more closely into touch with his world than less biblically-minded theologians than Irenaeus could easily imagine. It is God who acts; his hands are not independent agents simply carrying out his orders, but means through which he acts himself. As in the theology of the Apologists, the Logos continues to be seen as the medium of God’s self-revelation, particularly in the Old Testament theophanies in which the Logos was manifested to men. The revelatory function of the Logos is linked with his work in creation and in salvation. He is that hand of God which ‘forms us from the beginning to the end, and makes us fit for life, and is present with the creature whom he has moulded and perfects it in accordance with the image and likeness of God’.7 At the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

ib. 2.13.8; 2.28.5. ib. 2.28.5; 3.19.2. dent. 5; haer. 4.20.2ff. haer.-5.1.3. ib. 5.5.x. ib. 5.6.1. ib. 5.16.1.

46

A History of Christian Doctrine

Incarnation the Logos became manifest humanly, ‘making himself like man and making man like himself, so that by his likeness to the Son man might become precious to the Father’. The Logos in whose image man had been made had formerly been invisible. When the Word of God was made flesh he displayed the true image by becoming that which was his image, and restored the likeness by making man like the invisible Father through the visible Word.1 In this restoration the Spirit is again closely linked with the Logos, for the Spirit makes it possible to receive the revelation com¬ municated by the Logos.2 Just as the doctrine of creation lies at the heart of Irenaeus’ Trinitarian theology and supplies the motive for the progress which he made in that sphere, so also it is his concern with the re-creation of mankind which provides the driving-force for his Christology. He is interested primarily in soteriology: in the restoration of God’s original Creation. He is also con¬ cerned to maintain the identity of the person of Jesus Christ with the eternal Son, as against the tendencies of the Gnostic systems and Marcion to separate the Christ from the human Jesus. These basic concerns are the source of the great strength of his Christology - the clarity with which he asserts the unity of the person of Christ who is the Logos, who in turn is the actual manifestation of God himself and not an inferior mediator, and who is also fully human with the same humanity which 'was created in the beginning and which is restored in him. Irenaeus vigorously attacks those who divide Jesus from the Logos, or Jesus from the Christ, for scripture teaches one and the same Jesus Christ to whom the gates of heaven were opened by reason of his ascension in the flesh, and who will come in the same flesh in which he suffered, revealing the glory of the Father.3 He expounds the idea, though he does not use the later terminology, of the two natures. In a way which almost anticipates the doctrine of the interchange of the properties of deity and manhood in Christ (communicatio idiomatum), he points out that the New Testament often uses the name ‘Christ’ (signifying a divine being, such as the heretics supposed to have descended upon the human Jesus) in contexts which in fact speak of his humanity, his humiliation, suffering and death. This serves to underline the truth that he is Son of God and Son of man; and the very name ‘Christ’ has a Trinitarian significance, since it speaks of one who anoints (the Father), one who is anointed (the Son), and an anointing (the Spirit).4 He is especially anxious to show that Christ’s humanity is identical with our own.5 It is on this truth that his whole soteriology hinges, for in his view the work of Christ would be valueless if he had not become what we are and so made it possible to ‘recapitulate’ Adam in himself. Since Irenaeus points out in this context that we are both body and soul, it is likely that he means to imply that in becoming man the Logos assumed both flesh and 1 2 3 4 5

ib. dem. 7. haer. 3.16.8. ib. 3.18.3. ib. 3.22.1.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

47

human soul. It would follow in any case from the general line of his argu¬ ment that Irenaeus had a much clearer conception than most pre-Nicene theologians of the soteriological necessity of belief in the completeness of Christ’s manhood as opposed to any idea that the Incarnation means a dressing up of the Logos in an outer garment of flesh. On the other hand, he finds difficulty in really maintaining the personal unity that he so earnestly wants to predicate of the Logos incarnate. Like Melito and all the other ancient theologians who worked with a ‘two natures’ Christology (in Irenaeus the idea of ‘natures' is expressed by the terms ‘the God . . . the man’), he can scarcely avoid giving the impression that he thinks of deity and manhood being alternatively switched on and off during the gospel events. ‘Just as he was man so that he might be tempted, so he was Logos so that he might be glorified, the Logos remaining quiescent in the tempta¬ tions, and in the crucifixion and death, but co-operating with the man (i.e. the human nature) in victory . . . and resurrection and ascension.’1 The purpose of the Incarnation was to repair the consequences of Adam’s disobedience. Adam was created, according to Irenaeus, not as the glorious creature imagined by some Jewish and Christian thought, but as undevel¬ oped and child-like.2 He was given freedom of moral choice and a special gift, over and above the rationality which mirrored in him the Logos, which Irenaeus does not clearly specify but which is represented by the divine ‘likeness’; this seems to be identical with possession of the Spirit. Adam should have advanced towards the realization of these potentialities, but he fell through disobedience. This fall did not merely affect the subsequent history of mankind. It actually was the fall of mankind as a whole, for Adam is an individual with a corporate significance; all men were in Adam when he disobeyed God: they and he are identical.3 This belief in the solidarity of the human race with Adam corresponds to the Christological emphasis on the one-ness of Christ with mankind. Christ is not, as Gnostics and others alleged, a heavenly being who descended from heaven and, remaining impassible, never became one with the human race; as the Logos who is always present with mankind, he was made one with his own creation and became flesh, gathering up or ‘recapitulating’ all things into himself. He ‘recapitulates’ man into himself, being the invisible made visible, the incomprehensible made comprehensible, the impassible made passible, the Logos made man.4 This means that whereas all men had been, as it were, gathered up into Adam’s disobedience, they have now been gathered up into Christ as the second Adam. In him they have been reconciled to God, having become, collectively, obedient unto death.5 Thus the human race, summed up in Christ’s humanity, regains what it had lost in Adam, that is, to be in the image and likeness of God: something which could be achieved neither by man in his sinful condition nor by a re-creation of the original Adam but only by the descent of the Son into the human 1 ib. 3.19.3. 2 dem. 12; haer. 4.38.iff. 3 haer. 5.16.3, etc. 4 ib. 3.16.6. 5 ib. 5.16.3 recalling Phil.

2:8.

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state even to the point of death.1 ‘Recapitulation’ has also another aspect. In becoming the collective ‘Adam’ of a restored humanity, Christ repeated and reversed the history of the first Adam. The essential element in this recapitulation is the reversal of Adam’s disobedience by Christ’s supreme obedience ‘even unto death’. This is the heart of Irenaeus’ whole theology, for the doctrine of recapitulation, to which his understanding of Creation and Incarnation leads up, has a profound ethical content: man is saved by being taken up into Christ’s human obedience to the Father, and not simply by the fact of the Logos having assumed manhood. Irenaeus therefore delights in drawing out the parallel between the Adam story and the Christ story. The virgin birth of Christ, for instance, corresponds to the formation of Adam by a fresh act of creation. It could not be an exact parallel, for had the second Adam also been ‘moulded’ from the dust of the earth it would have been a new creation which would have been saved, and Adam’s race would have remained unaffected. The birth from Mary thus presents a parallel with Adam’s creation in that it is a new act of God and at the same time, so Irenaeus believes, it safeguards the continuity of Christ’s humanity with Adam’s, inasmuch as it is not newly created but is derived from Mary.2 Another parallel, which was to have consequences which Irenaeus could scarcely foresee, was drawn between the disobedience of Eve when she listened to the serpent’s voice and the obedience of Mary to the annunciation of the angel: the bonds which were tied by Eve’s faithlessness were loosed by Mary’s faith.3 Irenaeus’ interpretation of Christ’s work of salvation thus has at its centre the ideas of the restoration of man to the likeness of God through the Incarnation, and the incorporation of man into Christ’s obedience. It is summed up briefly in the famous words, characteristic of patristic Christology and soteriology, '. . . who by reason of his immeasurable love became what we are, in order that he might make us what he is himself’; 4 and at rather greater length: ‘The Lord redeems us by his own blood, and gives his life for our life and his flesh for our flesh, and pours out the Spirit of the Father to unite and bring into communion God and man, bringing down God to men through the Spirit and taking up man to God through his incarnation, and truly and actually bestows on us incorruptibility through communion with God’.5 The allusion to the blood of Christ is not merely a conventional piece of biblical phraseology, though Irenaeus, like all the ancient writers, uses a variety of scriptural images in interpreting the Cross. It is connected with his picture of man’s salvation as a rescue operation from captivity. The devil holds man in bondage. Christ redeems him from the ‘transgression and apostasy’ in which the devil keeps him chained. This redemption is achieved by Christ’s victory over the devil (‘as by the defeat of a man our race went down into death, so by the victory of a man we may ascend to 1 2 3 4 5

haer. 3.18.x. ib. 3.21.20-22.2. ib. 3.32.3-4. ib. 5 proem. ib. 5.1.1.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

49

life’1), in which the Temptations play a vitally important role as the scene of the triumph of the second Adam’s obedience.2 Combined with this thought, however, is the interpretation of Christ’s blood as a ransom paid to the devil for the release of his prisoners. This ransom is in accordance with the principle of justice; God’s creation is saved from perishing, yet justice is safeguarded, and the devil is made to relinquish his victims by persuasion and not by an act of violence like that by which he had originally seized them.3 Here, again, lie the seeds of unforeseen and unhappy theo¬ logical developments: in this case the theory of the ‘devil’s rights’. Irenaeus, however, does no more than glance in that direction. His conception of the reconciling work of Christ is much more complex and profound than any theory of mere transaction. A good modern summary of it is afforded by Newman’s well-known hymn, ‘Praise to the Holiest in the height’. It must, however, be admitted that although Irenaeus makes it perfectly clear that man is restored by Christ’s recapitulation of Adam, he offers two different interpretations of this at the same time. As we have seen, he lays great emphasis on Christ’s human obedience, culminating in his death, as the means by which Adam’s disobedience is reversed and annulled. On the other hand, he also understands it as the union of humanity in the Incarna¬ tion with the incorruptibility and immortality of the Son of God, in whom what was mortal is swallowed up in immortality; so that in this sense ‘he became what we are to make us what he is’.4 Here, then, we find in Irenaeus that unresolved tension, so characteristic of Greek patristic theology, be¬ tween salvation by sharing in Christ’s human conquest of sin and salvation by participation in the nature of the divine Logos. Man’s perfection will come only after his resurrection, when he attains the incorruptibility that is given in the vision of God. Yet the words of Psalm 82:6, ‘I said, you are gods’, applies already to all Christians, for they have received the Spirit of adoption whereby we cry, ‘Abba, Father’.6 Their union with the incarnate Logos and with his Spirit is effected during this life through the operation of faith and love and through the sacraments. The transition of the individual believer from the old Adam to the new, from wearing the image of the earthly to wearing the image of the heavenly (1 Cor. 15:49), is effected in baptism. This signifies a washing from the old life of ‘vanity’ through belief in the name of the Lord and reception of his Spirit.6 Baptism is the seal of eternal life and rebirth as sons of God.7 The eucharist is an assurance of the hope of the resurrection of the body, a hope which belongs integrally to Irenaeus’ theology of creation. ‘How can they say that the flesh goes to corruption and does not participate in life, when it is nourished by the Lord’s body and his blood? . . . We offer him his own, rightly proclaiming the fellowship and union of flesh and spirit. For as bread from the earth, receiving the invocation of God, is no longer ordinary 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

ib. 5.21.1. ib. 5.21.2-3. ib. 5.1.1. ib. 4.38.3; 5 ib. 3.6.1. ib. 5.11.2. dem. 3.

proem. See above p. 48.

A History of Christian Doctrine

50

bread, but thankoffering (eucharist), composed of two things, earthly and heavenly, so also our bodies which partake of the eucharist are no longer corruptible but have the hope of resurrection for ever.'1 It is in line with his general insistence on belief in the creation of the material world by God himself that he uses the evidence of the eucharist to prove the value and significance of material objects. Christ took bread and wine and declared them to be his body and blood. It is therefore right to offer them as thanks¬ giving sacrifices, not as though God needed firstfruits and offerings from what he has created but ‘in order that we may not be ourselves unfruitful and ungrateful’.2 In harmony, too, with his general doctrine of creation is Irenaeus’ belief that the soul descends, like Christ, to an intermediate state (Hades) to await the resurrection of the body, with which, and not, as Gnostics believed, as a disembodied soul translated to heaven at the moment of death, it will ascend to God.3 It is also characteristic that, like Justin, he should take a literalistic view of the hope of the new Jerusalem and the reign of the saints.4

1 2 3 4

haer. 4.18.5. ib. 4.17.5. ib. 5.31.1-2. ib. 5-35-36.

IV EARLY LATIN THEOLOGY: TERTULLIAN AND NOVATIAN The theology of Tertullian closely resembles that of Irenaeus in its main outline. Like the latter, Tertullian was largely concerned with the repudia¬ tion of heresies, including as the subjects of full-length treatises the teaching of the Gnostics Hermogenes (who maintained a dualist theory against the biblical doctrine of Creation) and Valentinus, and of Marcion against whom Tertullian produced the longest of his thirty or so surviving works. It is because of his preoccupation with controversy against what he judges to be dangerously syncretistic speculations that he adopts a vigorously hostile attitude towards Greek philosophy. This is to quite a large extent a position which he takes up for the sake of his polemics; he was deeply influenced himself by philosophy, and his debt to Stoicism in particular was great, causing him to hold a materialistic idea of the nature of the soul: it is a material substance, though of the most light and tenuous kind. Nevertheless, his attitude towards the dangers of philosophy and his rigid notions of the authority of ecclesiastical tradition differentiate Tertullian sharply from such theologians as the Apologists or Clement of Alexandria. For Tertullian, as for Irenaeus, authority in matters of doctrine resides in the teaching of Christ which it was the task of the apostles whom he chose and sent out to impart to the nations. Everything must be understood by reference to its origin (itself a philosophical dictum), and the many churches scattered throughout the world can be traced back to the one from which they have all sprung: the church of the apostles. Tertullian, who did so much to establish the theological language of Latin-speaking Christianity, seems to be the coiner of the phrase ‘the Apostolic Age’.1 From a relatively early date the history of the primitive Church had been reconstructed in terms of a centrally directed, apostolically controlled, mission in which the original Twelve were the leaders and organizers and also the dominically commis¬ sioned teachers who imparted the orthodox faith, learned from Christ, to those whom they appointed in turn to rule the churches. This picture of the apostolic age, first sketched in Luke-Acts and i Clement, came rapidly to be elaborated during the second century as a defence against heretical innovations. Tertullian accepted it and explained it in even more formal and clear-cut statements than those of Irenaeus. According to Tertullian, the norm of the correct apostolic doctrine is to be found in the living tradition handed down in the official teaching of the 1

praescr.

32.

A History of Christian Doctrine

52

churches where the apostles preached and to which they addressed letters. The succession of authority is: the churches, the apostles, Christ, God.1 This succession is maintained in those churches which can produce evidence of a pedigree of bishops from the present time to the apostolic founders, guaranteeing the maintenance of a succession of sound teaching. Tertullian’s argument, however, tends to be circular, for even if an episcopal succession can be produced (or faked up) this is not enough in itself. Heretics may manage to do this, but their doctrine is shown up as false directly it is compared with the authentic apostolic teaching.2 In the end Tertullian is claiming that what his church and the churches in communion with it recognize as orthodox is to be accepted as authoritative.3 He will not allow heretics to appeal to scripture against this received tradition; indeed the argument of the whole treatise De Praescriptione Haereticorum (A Demurrer to the Heretics) is designed to forestall such an appeal by the argument that only those who stand in the right tradition, which is more ancient and therefore, as he thinks, true as contrasted with heretical innovations,4 have the right to interpret scripture. The content of the authentic tradition is enshrined in the ‘rule of faith’ which his citations show to have summarized the main tenets of Christianity with considerable flexibility in detail.5 With this authoritarian concept of orthodoxy (he was impressed by the relation between faith and reason implied in the text, ‘Unless you shall have believed you will not understand’),6 it is not surprising that Tertullian professed to regard philosophy as a main source of heresy. ‘Philosophical’ heresy conflicts with Christian truth at certain points in particular: the wrath of God (as against Marcion’s theology), creation out of nothing, the restoration in the resurrection of the same flesh in which death has taken place, and the virgin birth of Christ.7 So, he argues, the characteristic ideas of Valentinus are derived from Platonism, Marcion’s theology from Stoicism, and the influence of Aristotelian dialectic causes heretics and philosophers to ask the same questions about the problem of evil (Marcion’s basic question), the origin of man, and ‘whence is God?’, all of which leads him to his famous rhetorical question, ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What has the Academy in common with the Church, or what have the heretics with Christians?’8 Tertullian is greatly concerned with the need to defend the Christian idea of creation against dualism, and in doing this he follows similar arguments to those of Irenaeus. The material world is good; God would not make anything unworthy of himself. The Incarnation demonstrates God’s love for his creation, and the sacramental use of water, oil, milk and honey, and bread shows that the God who is the Father of Christ does not reject the works of the Creator, as he would if, as Marcion supposes, the former 1 ib. 20.21. 2 ib. 32. 3 ib. 4 Marc. 4.5; 5.19. 5 e.g., Prax. 2, praescr. 6 Marc. 4.20. 7 ib. 5.19. 8 praescr. 7.

13.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

53

stands in opposition to the latter.1 Both scripture and natural religion are adduced as evidence for faith in the one God who is both Creator and the God of Jesus, the natural evidences including man’s instinctive regard for the order and beauty of the world and also the innate faith in God evinced by the ordinary uneducated pagan’s involuntary ejaculations of fear, praise, hope in God (he does not, in moments of strong tension, call upon the individual gods of polytheism).2 Scripture is adduced at times in order to refute misunderstandings; for instance, the Pauline allusions, which might seem dualistic, to ‘the rulers of this world’ and ‘the god of this world’ are explained away: the former as referring to human authorities such as Herod, Pilate and the Roman Empire, the latter either by repunctuating the sentence so as to give an entirely different sense, or by identifying ‘the god of this world’ with the devil (but not with the creator).3 Tertullian realizes, however, that Marcion’s dualism is ultimately rooted in the problem of evil. He therefore argues that man’s fall does not impugn the goodness of God’s creation. It was not due to God’s impotence or malevolence, but solely to man’s free will. Man is the author of sin. His soul is not a part of God’s Spirit, which would involve God in sin, but is a created image of it. Isaiah (45:7) speaks of God creating evil, but this means only that God devises just punishments which, like the ‘severity’ of the surgeon, are intended for good. So, too, the Law is good and its apparent inconsistencies with the Gospel are to be explained by its having been adapted to the particular needs of the Israelites.4 The Galatian dispute was about the one and the same God’s Law and Gospel, not, as Marcion sup¬ posed, about two gods and two religions.5 In the end dualism is incompatible with the Christian assurance that all things will be ‘recapitulated’ in Christ (Eph. 1); Marcion’s God, invisible, remote, complacent, is a god of philo¬ sophers only; and Tertullian claims that ‘if God is not One, he is not’.6 On another front, however, Tertullian has to fight against those who wished to understand the unity of God in a way which would make the deity an absolute monad, ruling out the distinctions within unity which seemed essential for bringing God into relation with the world and enabling deity to be ascribed to Christ. In antiquity this theology was termed ‘monarchianism’. The modern distinction between ‘modalist’ and ‘dynamic’ monarchianism is rather confusing, since the latter term denotes ‘adoptionism’, which is a quite different form of unitarianism from the former, to which alone the term ‘monarchianism’ was originally applied. Monarchian¬ ism was intended as a simple way of expressing the essential beliefs that God is one and that Christ is God. Those who taught it believed that the subtleties of the Logos theology endangered both these truths; it could easily suggest that God is two, or three, and that though Christ is the Logos he could be inferior to the Father and not as fully God as he. Justin recognized 1 2 3 4 5 6

Marc. 1.13-14. test. anim. 1-2. Marc. 5.6, 11. ib. 2.6-18. ib. 5.2. ib. 5.17; 2.27; 1.3.

A History of Christian Doctrine

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that some Christians were prepared to admit a distinction between the Logos and the Father in name only; the Logos was an aspect of God’s operation and not numerically distinct from him.1 Noetus of Smyrna, according to the treatise against him by Hippolytus of Rome, Tertullian’s contemporary, began from a literal interpretation of the Johannine text, ‘I and the Father are one’. This meant that the one God, the Father, was incarnate as Jesus Christ, and was the subject of human experiences. To Noetus this was far from shocking. 'What have I done wrong,’ he protested, ‘in glorifying the one only God, who was born and suffered and died?’2 He was anxious to de-personalize the biblical term ‘Word’. If God is one without distinctions, then his word must be his spoken word; to allege that ‘word’ is ‘Son’ would be strange. When St. John speaks of the Word in the Fourth Gospel it must be borne in mind that there and in the Apocalypse he uses the term allegorically.3 Tertullian’s opponent, Praxeas, held exactly the same position, and since it is not known who Praxeas was it is conceivable that he might be identical with Noetus or with one of those disciples of the latter who, according to Hippolytus, taught in Rome. He believed the Father and Son to be one and the same,4 with the result that the one God who is impassible assumed passibility and experienced the life, death and resurrection. At the same time Praxeas had to account for the biblical language of ‘Son’. He would not refer this to the Word, which must not be hypostatized, and therefore he used the term to refer to the man Jesus. The ‘Spirit’ or ‘God’ that operates in Jesus is the Father. Thus ‘the Son suffers, the Father suffers with him’.5 Had we a complete account of Noetus’ theology we should probably find that he interpreted ‘Son’ similarly, for it is hard to see what else he could have done with that extremely frequent scriptural designation of Christ. This is the theory which Tertullian attacked: one which, as stated by these proponents of it, laid itself immediately open to violent counter¬ attack from the horrified believers in the basic axioms of Greek theology. The same type of theology was apparently taught by Sabellius, who impressed Callistus, bishop of Rome, favourably but was himself attacked by Hippolytus.6 As a bogeyman in the fourth-century controversies Sabellius exerted a much greater influence on theology than he ever had as a flesh-and-blood teacher; for this reason, it is hard to distinguish his doctrine from that of fourth-century theologians, such as Marcellus of Ancyra, whom their opponents labelled ‘Sabellian’. It is likely, however, that for Sabellius ‘God’ meant essentially God the Father, while ‘Son’ and ‘Holy Spirit' denoted aspects, perhaps successive, of this one God, relating to his work in redemption and sanctification respectively. In Sabellius’ view, as apparently also in that of Callistus, there could be no hypostatic 1

dial.

128.

Noet. 1. ib. 15. Prax. 5. ib. 7, 27, 29. Hipp. haer. 9.11.

2 Hipp. 3 4 5 8

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

55

distinctions in God; there is but one individual presentation (prosopon) of deity.1 Tertullian agrees that there is but one God, but this is to be understood with reference to the ‘dispensation’ or ‘economy’ (Tertullian uses the Greek word oikonomia, employed also by Hippolytus in this context) whereby there is a Son of the one God, his Word which proceeded forth from him through whom all things were made.2 The meaning he gives to ‘economy’ is not wholly clear. The term, which means ‘disposition’ or ‘arrangement’, is very often used by the Fathers, including Irenaeus, to denote God’s plan of creation and redemption, and it becomes a common synonym for the Incarnation. It may also mean the ‘ordering’ or ‘organization’ of a complex series or organism. Probably Tertullian intends it to mean that God’s unity is subject to the disposition or ‘deploying’ of the single Godhead into Father and Son or Word (and Spirit) in accordance with the Father’s intention to create. He goes on to state that unity of substance (i.e. essence) is preserved, ‘while none the less is safeguarded the mystery of that “economy” which deploys the unity into trinity’ (Tertullian introduces the actual Latin word, trinitas, corresponding to Theophilus’ ‘triad’, into Christian literature), ‘setting forth Father and Son and Spirit as three: three, however, not in quality but in sequence, not in substance but in aspect, not in power but in manifestation, yet of one substance and one quality and one power, seeing it is one God from whom those sequences and aspects and manifestations are apportioned out under the heading of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’.3 Here is a real attempt to say something about the relation between the diversity of the Godhead (in respect of its manifestation and operation) and its essential unity, and although Tertullian’s terminology is difficult to interpret with precision it is clear that a great advance has been made in the development of Trinitarian theology. In his scriptural exegesis Tertullian also took an important step towards the Trinitarian distinction between the three persons. Those texts which seemed to indicate that God was addressing a heavenly companion had long been used to prove the distinction between the Father and the hypostatized Logos. Tertullian introduced the Holy Spirit as a third participant in this divine dialogue. In Psalm 110:1 he assumes that the Holy Spirit is the speaker: ‘Notice, too, the Spirit speaking as a third interlocutor about the Father and the Son, “The Lord said to my Lord” ’ (i.e. the Holy Spirit’s Lord). In Isaiah 53:1, again, the Spirit is addressing the Father concerning the Son: ‘Lord, who has believed our report and to whom is the arm of the Lord (i.e. the Son) revealed?’ ‘So,’ says Tertullian, ‘in these texts the distinctness of the three is plainly set out, for there is the Spirit who makes the statement, the Father to whom he addresses it, and the Son who is the subject of it’.4 Tertullian’s recognition that despite this clear distinction between them the three are ‘of one substance' paves the way for the Nicene formula. 1 Epiphanius 8 3 4

Prax. 2. ib. ib. 11.

haer.

62.iff.

A History of Christian Doctrine

56

In seeking to elucidate this ‘economy’ Tertullian is less successful. His opponent’s attachment to the idea of ‘monarchy’ suggests to him an unfortunate analogy. Monarchy means sovereignty, and sovereignty can be exercised jointly by an emperor and a colleague, or it can be administered through provincial governors, while itself remaining one and indivisible.1 This illustration is open to the retort that the ‘economy’ might seem to imply at the least an extreme subordination and at worst polytheism. In fact he can only try to defend himself by saying that if sovereignty does not cease to belong to one, and so to be a monarchy, because it is exercised by thousands of subordinate governors, how much less does God suffer division because, while they are partners in the essence of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit occupy second and third place. Other analogies, however, are better: ‘God brought forth the Word as a root brings forth the shoot and the spring the river and the sun its beam. Each of these might aptly be termed a "son” or "offspring” of its parent source; but the shoot is not cut off from the root as a separate entity, nor the river from the spring. In each case there is a distinction without separation.’ To bring the Holy Spirit within this series of analogies Tertullian proceeds to add a third member: the fruit to the shoot, an irrigation channel to the river, and the apex of light to the sunbeam. These may be taken as early attempts to say something about the ‘procession’ of the Holy Spirit.2 In trying to explain, rather than illustrate, the ‘economy’ Tertullian echoes the ideas of the Apologists. God was originally alone, in the sense that there was nothing external to himself. Yet properly speaking he was not alone, for he had with him his immanent reason, within himself. Here Tertullian has to explain the double meaning of ‘Logos’ as ‘reason’ and ‘word’, for he is at a disadvantage compared with the Greek writers in that he works with the Latin sermo. God’s reason or word is identical with his Wisdom. Then, when the moment came for God to utter ‘Let there be light’ his Word came forth, and by this coming forth, or begetting, the Word became Son. The position, then, is that ‘the Son is other than the Father, not by diversity but by distribution, not by division but by distinction, because the Father is not identical with the Son, they being actually numerically one and another. For the Father is the whole substance, while the Son is an outflow and assignment of the whole, as he himself professes, "My Father is greater than I” . . . So also the Father is other than the Son as being greater than the Son, as he who begets is other than he who is begotten ... as he who makes is other than he through whom a thing is made.’3 The subordinationism of this last passage, characteristic of Ter¬ tullian, is very general in pre-Nicene Trinitarian thought. The Godhead is one, but the substantial unity is compatible with a hierarchal ordering of the ‘persons’ within that unity, corresponding to the roles which they perform in the ‘economy’. In line with this, too, is Tertullian’s repetition of the old doctrine of the generation of the Word by the Father’s will.4 1 2 3 4

ib. ib. ib. ib.

3. 8. 9. 6.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

57

It should be observed that Hippolytus was directing virtually the same arguments against the ‘monarchianism’ of Noetus at Rome. He begins with the primal one-ness of God: ‘God being alone and having nothing contem¬ poraneous with himself willed to create a world, which he made by thought, will and utterance . . . But although he was alone he was manifold, for he was not without reason or wisdom or power or counsel; but all were in him and he was the All.' For Creation God put forth the Logos: “When he willed, as he willed, he generated his Logos, through whom he made all things . . . for he constructs all things that he makes through his Word and Wisdom, creating by Word and setting in order by Wisdom.’1 Here is a similar notion of a Trinitarian operation of God in Creation to that which was entertained by the Apologists. The generation of the Logos means that he is thenceforth ‘other'; but this does not imply two gods: the relationship is like that of light from light, water from spring and ray from the sun. There is one ‘power’ (by which Hippolytus, like Tertullian, virtually means ‘deity in action’), which is from the Father. The All is Father, from whom is the power, the Logos; and this is Mind which, having come forth into the world was manifested as Son (or possibly, Servant) of God; all things are ‘through him’, but he alone is ‘from the Father’.2 Hippolytus repeats that this does not mean that he implies two gods, ‘but one God: yet two “persons” (prosopa) by “economy” (that is, by virtue of the ‘deployment’ of God’s creative Reason as effective Word), and thirdly the grace of the Holy Spirit’.3 He tries to explain how the ‘economy’ requires this triadic structure; but, as his odd allusion to the ‘grace’ of the Spirit as ‘third’ indicates (assuming this to be the right reading of a confused text), he finds it hard to speak convincingly of the role of the Spirit. The ‘economy’ supports the unity of God, he claims, ‘for there is one God, the Father commanding, the Son obeying, and the Holy Spirit giving understanding, the Father over all, the Son through all, and the Holy Spirit in all. The Jews knew the Father but not the Son, the disciples the Son but not in the Holy Spirit - otherwise they would not have denied him.'4 All this leads Hippolytus on to quote the Trinitarian baptismal command of Mt. 28:19, and it seems probable that the attempt to produce a theology of the Spirit parallel to that which is expressed in terms of the economy of Father and Logos was undertaken chiefly with a view to taking account of the threefold structure of the credal interrogations of the candidates in the rite of baptism (described by Hippolytus in his Apostolic Tradition), the prominence of the Holy Spirit in the liturgy and theology of baptism, and the scriptural passages, such as the last verses of Matthew and the Johannine discourses, which lay behind the liturgical tradition. There was great pressure from the side of metaphysics for a dyadic theology; the presupposition of Greek religion required the Church to work along the lines of the Logos doctrine in order to reconcile divine transcendence with divine immanence, God in Christ with God in heaven. There was no such 1 2 3 4

Hipp. Noet. 10. ib. 11. ib. 14. ib.

58

A History of Christian Doctrine

demand for a metaphysic of the Holy Spirit, and the natural language in which the Spirit was spoken of was that of Christian life and worship, individual and corporate. The attempt to bring the Spirit into the ‘economy' of Creation produced a confusing mixture of language levels. Hence the awkward distinction between the creation and the ‘ordering’ of the universe; hence, too, the introduction into the metaphysical argument of the idea that if the disciples had known Christ ‘in the Spirit’ they would not have denied him. This latter thought belongs to the sphere of Christian witness, especially the witness of confessors and martyrs, and inspiration to know Christ and acknowledge him: and this, rather than the theory of the ‘economy’, is the area in which the language of ‘Holy Spirit’ is genuinely appropriate. There is some difference of emphasis between Hippolytus and Tertullian in the use of the term ‘Son’. For the latter it was appropriate to employ it in respect of the Logos as generated for Creation. Hippolytus, commenting on God’s sending of the Son in the flesh (Rom. 8:3-4), says that the Logos is here termed ‘Son’ because he was about to become man. ‘Son’ is his new name of love for men; for without the flesh and in himself the Logos was not fully Son although he was fully ‘Only-begotten Logos’, nor could flesh subsist by itself without the Logos because it has its subsistence in the Logos; thus he was manifested (in the Incarnation) as one perfect Son of God.1 Besides illustrating Hippolytus’ view that the Sonship of the Logos begins with the Incarnation rather than the primal generation, this passage is Christologically significant. Christ is a unity; and the unity is located, as it were, in his being as the Logos. The flesh, by which Hippolytus means Christ’s humanity as opposed to ‘spirit’ or deity, has its subsistence in the Logos. It has no independent existence as an hypostasis in itself, but exists simply in virtue of being the humanity of the Logos-Son. Here is an anticipation in some. degree of the Alexandrian Christology of later times. Tertullian, in somewhat different language, works out a more elaborate, but similar Christology. His first object is to refute the monarchian view held by Praxeas (as, according to Hippolytus, it was also by Callistus of Rome),2 that it is proper to regard the humanity (flesh) of Christ as ‘the Son’ and his spirit or deity as ‘the Father’.3 Tertullian also uses this terminology, but for him, of course, ‘spirit’ means the divine Logos-Son. He wants to make it quite clear that the person of Christ is an indivisible unity: there is a true incarnation of the Son of God. The emphasis lies equally on both parts of this statement. Against Praxeas, it is the Son, distinct from the Father, who became man; against Marcion, the Son became fully man, and did not merely assume a human disguise. Tertullian therefore asserts the scandalous paradox of the Incarnation with the utmost possible vigour. The subject of the human experience of Christ, the subject, indeed, of the Incarnation, is none other than the Son. ‘The Son of God was born; one is not ashamed to confess it, just because it is shameful. And the Son of God died; one can believe it, just because it is absurd. And he was 1 2 3

ib. 15. haer. 9.12, Prax. 27.

16-19.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

59

buried and rose; it is certain, just because it is impossible.’1 That it is God the Son who lived and died is the essential truth on which Tertullian’s soteriology depends; for, like Irenaeus, he interprets the work of Christ for salvation as an interchange of places with mankind: God lived with man, so that man might be able to live with God; God became small so that man might become great.2 He attempts to give a theological rationale of this basic belief. ‘We must enquire how the Word became flesh: by being transformed into flesh, or by putting on flesh?’3 It cannot be by transformation, for this would involve mutability on the part of the Word who is God; it might also imply a fusion, or confusion, of deity and manhood so as to produce what would be neither the one nor the other but a third entity different from either. It must therefore be by putting on flesh. There is no fusion; the Word remains God, the flesh remains man; he is Son of man and Son of God, each substance (that is, flesh or humanity and spirit or deity)4 being distinct in its own proper nature (;proprietas). Thus, Tertullian appropriately quotes Rom. 1:3-4: ‘ “Who was made of the seed of David’’; here he will be man and Son of man: “Who was defined as Son of God according to the Spirit’’; here he will be God and the Word, the Son of God. We observe a double quality {status), not confused but conjoined, in one person God and man, Jesus.’ Quoting Jn. 3:6, Tertullian continues, ‘Flesh does not become spirit, nor spirit flesh: evidently they can both be in one person. Of these Jesus is composed, of flesh as man, and of spirit as God.’5 In this way Tertullian works out a doctrine of two ‘essences’ or ‘substances’ remaining unconfused and distinct, conjoined in one person. In the one person of the Word made flesh there is a two-fold quality, just as in his Trinitarian theology Tertullian pointed to a single quality (the three are one in status). The distinction between the two ‘substances’ is actual and not merely theoretical. The peculiar character (proprietas) of each remains unimpaired, so that the ‘spirit’ carried out its own activities in him, that is to say powers and works and signs, and the ‘flesh’ accomplished its own experiences, hungering, thirsting and weeping for Lazarus, and finally died.6 This is a typical exposition of what came to be known as a ‘two natures’ Christology, clearly distinguishing humanity and deity, each of which operates what is appro¬ priate to it, but less clear when it comes to trying to give an explanation of how one undivided person, and that the person of God the Word, can be the single subject of both these sharply differentiated sets of experiences. In the fifth century this first essay in Latin Christology was to become an unacknowledged source for the famous Tome ([dogmatic] treatise, see p. 140) of Leo. A very important aspect of Tertullian’s Christology is his insistence on the completeness of Christ’s manhood. At times his language may suggest the contrary, as when he summarizes his Christology for a pagan audience: 1 2 3 4 5

cam. Christ. Marc. 2.27. Prax. 27. earn Christ. Prax. 27.

5.

18

6o

A History of Christian Doctrine

God's Logos, like a ray of the sun, descended into the virgin, was formed as flesh in her womb, and was born as ‘man mingled with God’. The 'flesh', informed by the ‘spirit’ was nourished, grew up . . . and is Christ.1 But this is not the case. Tertullian believes that Christ’s flesh did not even possess human distinction, let alone heavenly beauty; otherwise it could not have been despised and insulted. It was in fact subject to all human infirmities.2 He is particularly clear in his conviction that the work of saving the whole man, soul and body, necessitated the assumption by the Word of a human soul: a point which was little understood by many early theologians.3 Hence against Marcion and Valentinus he asserts the reality of Christ’s birth. He did not simply appear as man without deriving actual humanity from Mary; and although Tertullian thinks the genuineness of Christ’s manhood to be perfectly compatible with the virgin birth, for in his view the single parent is a sufficient source for genuine manhood, he nevertheless rejects the idea that Mary’s virginity was preserved in giving birth as docetic in its implications.4 This emphasis on the solidarity of Christ with the human face leads him into a discussion whether or not Christ’s flesh was sinful. It could be argued that if his flesh were our flesh it must be sinful; and Tertullian does not in any way object to the premiss that our flesh is inherently sinful, for he insists more strongly than his predecessors on the participation of all men in Adam’s sin, the uncleanness of all men until they cease to be in Adam and come to be in Christ, and the corruption passed on to them from Adam (a view which his traducianist theory of the soul, as inherited from parents along with the body, makes it all the easier for him to hold).5 But he argues that the identical flesh which is by nature sinful in men was in Christ sinless; in making it his own he made it to be without sin. Sin is no more a necessary character of human nature than is birth by the ordinary process of generation: Adam was indubitably human but was not born by human generation. Christ was indubitably human, but neither bom by human generation nor subject to the inheritance of sinfulness.6 Tertullian’s contribution to soteriology is much less important. For the most part he repeats biblical language about the sacrificial nature of Christ’s death, but although he speaks about the death more often than most earlier theologians had done, this is usually to prove the reality of Christ’s flesh against docetism rather than to interpret the significance of the Cross for salvation. This is true of the well-known saying: ‘Christ was sent to die (mori missus), and had necessarily to be bom so that he might be able to die.’7 The argument here is simply that the Incarnation must really involve the Word in human nature, unlike the appearance of angels in human shape. The same is true of the similar statement in his anti-Marcionite polemic, though there he does say rather more: ‘Christ alone had to be bom into flesh from flesh, so that he might give a new character to our birth by 1

apol.

2 e.g., 3 4 5 6

7

21.

earn. Christ.

9.

ib. ioff. ib. 23. res. cam. 49; anim. earn. Christ. 16. ib. 6.

16, 39-41;

test. anim.

3;

anim.

27.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

61

his birth, and so too abolish our death by his death, by rising in the flesh in which he was born that he might even be able to die.’1 This ‘Irenaean’ interpretation of Christ’s saving work is characteristic of the small amount of exposition which Tertullian devotes to the subject. It is possibly surprising, though creditable to Tertullian’s theological judgement, that he did not introduce into his interpretation of Christ's death the idea of ‘satisfaction’ which played a prominent part in his theory of penance. He was always greatly impressed by the seriousness of postbaptismal sin. In baptism the believer receives forgiveness of sins, regenera¬ tion, assurance of resurrection life, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit (though the later chapters of his treatise on Baptism, seemingly in contra¬ diction to his earlier insistence on the interaction of the Spirit and water, associate the coming of the Spirit with the post-baptismal laying-on of the hand by the bishop).2 Here the believer comes within the scope of Christ’s saving work. But this grace is retrospective rather than prospective, so far as forgiveness is concerned. The baptized person has been given a new start; but this cannot be repeated if he sins gravely after he has received it. This is why, since his idea of original sin does not imply a transmission of guilt as well as of defect, Tertullian thinks it dangerous to administer baptism to children.3 It is true that in his earlier days Tertullian was prepared to follow the precedent of Hermas and allow that there could be a second penitence, that is to say one more after baptism: but never more.4 It would seem that the sins in question were apostasy, murder and adultery; the first apparently continued to be thought unforgivable in the Church until Cyprian’s policy established distinctions among those who had lapsed in the Decian persecution and laid down conditions for reconciliation varying with the gravity of the offence. Hippolytus,5 who took a rigorist attitude, attacked Callistus for his readiness to readmit these serious offenders (but probably not apostates at this stage) and for his citation of the parable of the tares and the presence of clean and unclean animals in the ark as a warrant for his laxity.6 Tertullian, in his Montanist period, having embraced an exclusive sectarian concept of the Church as a society of the morally righteous, which would be contaminated by the presence of sinners within its membership, violently attacked a bishop who presumed, like a heathen pontifex maximus (high priest) or a ‘bishop of bishops’, to remit, after the performance of penance, the sins of adultery and fornication (this lax innovator being either Agrippinus of Carthage or Callistus).7 By that stage in his career Tertullian was sure that the Holy Spirit would be driven from the Church if grave sinners were not expelled.8 Before he turned schismatic, however, he was prepared to speak more freely about the possibility of the post-baptismal sinner compensating for his offence and restoring his bapMarc. 3.9. 2 bapt. 1, 6, 8, 10. 3 ib. 18. * paenit. 7. 5 Dan. 1.15. 6 haer. 9.12, 22. 7 pudic. 1. 8 ib. 13. 1

62

A History of Christian Doctrine

tismal state of forgiveness by doing works of penance. In this way he makes satisfaction to God and restores the balance of debt. Later theology was to go further in this matter than Tertullian and apply the concept of satis¬ faction to the death of Christ. Like Irenaeus, Tertullian holds a literalistic eschatology to be implied by his doctrine of creation. He therefore spends much time in asserting the truth of the resurrection of the flesh, and believes, like Irenaeus, in an intermediate state or refrigerium for the dead until the general resurrection.1 Death in Adam was a bodily death; resurrection in Christ must be bodily. That ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom’ means only that the sinful works of the flesh cannot do so. St. Paul’s allusion to baptism for the dead refers to the baptism of our bodies with a view to their resurrection from death.2 These and many other arguments are deployed, especially against Marcion’s denial of the value and goodness of the material creation. For the same reason, and also because of his Montanist inclinations (the original Montanists of Asia expected the descent of the new Jerusalem at Pepuza in Phrygia), Tertullian believes strongly in the millenarian reign on earth in the Jerusalem which is to come from heaven.3 This strong belief in the early Church became discredited through its association with Montanism and because it came to be regarded as a naive piece of literalism. The movement in early third-century Rome of the Alogi, as their opponents called them (people without the Logos, or people without reason), and the Roman presbyter Gaius, against the Johannine literature sought to under¬ mine the basic tenets of Montanism, millenarian eschatology and the doctrine of the age of the Paraclete, both of which were founded on the Gospel or the Apocalypse of St. John. It apparently had the effect of discrediting the old literalism; for Hippolytus, who was interested in apoca¬ lyptic and wrote both on Daniel and on the Antichrist, intexpreted the thousand-year reign allegorically in a work against Gaius: it stands for a glorious spiritual reign of Christ.4 5 Trinitarian and Christological thinking of a generally similar kind to Tertullian’s had established itself firmly in the West by the middle of the third century. At that time Novatian, probably before he led a very serious schism on the issue of Church discipline (he took a perfectionist view of the Church and consequently an ultra-rigorist attitude to grave sinners, par¬ ticularly to those who apostatized in the Decian persecution), wrote his treatise On the Trinity, an exposition of the ‘rule of truth’ beginning with the ineffability and incomprehensibility of God, the supreme and unchange¬ able author of all good. Since God contains all things there could not be more than one God, one infinite being; and scriptural anthropomorphisms, which are parabolic, do not detract from the actual infinity and absolute simplicity of God. The second part of the rule of faith introduces Christ, ‘our Lord God, but the Son of God’.6 As Son of man he is genuinely human, Marc. 4.34. 2 ib. 5-9, 10. 3 ib. 3.24. 4 fr. c. Gaium. 5 Trin. 9. 1

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

63

not a docetic phantasm; but he is also fully God by reason of the mingling of the deity of the Word with humanity in the union.1 Man and God (Tertullian’s two ‘substances’) subsist in Christ together, manifested in weakness and power respectively; it is important to notice that Novatian does not speak of love in this context, for the general tendency to think of deity in terms of power, and of humanity in terms of infirmity such as hunger, thirst, suffering, and indeed almost in terms of animal nature and its experiences, increased the difficulty of the Christological problem. Such texts as ‘glorify me with the glory which I had with thee before the world was’ are taken by Novatian as proof that Christ as God existed substantially before the foundation of the world. It is not a matter of predestination in the counsels of God but of actual pre-existence.2 Like Tertullian Novatian holds that the Word proceeded from the Father, but that this was before all creation.3 The Word was begotten as Son, when the Father willed. This is a ‘substantial’ putting forth; the Word is a substance, not like a human word which is sound and not an entity. Yet he is always in the Father; his existence is timeless, since he is before time; and he is always in the Father since the Father would otherwise not be always Father. The Father, as such, is necessarily prior to the Son, and the Son is less, since his being is derived from the Father. This order or priority, arising from the derivation of the Son, safeguards monotheism, for, says Novatian, were the Son not begotten there would be two ingenerate beings, that is two gods; in fact, though he who was begotten is God, the derivation of his being shows that there is but one God. Further, the deity which the Father transmitted to the Son reverts back to the Father, ‘turning back’ to him by virtue of the community of substance between Father and Son.4 5 This probably means, not that the Son will be reabsorbed into the Father when the ‘economy’ has been completed, though an allusion in this context to 1 Cor. 15:25ff. may point to that, but rather that the Godhead transmitted from Father to Son is reflected back, as it were, in a circular movement. If this should be Novatian’s meaning, he is partly anticipating the later concept of perichoresis or mutual interpenetration (see p. 120). Only one chapter of Novatian’s book is devoted to the Holy Spirit, and it is significant that once again the theme changes at this point from theo¬ logical metaphysics to a straightforward description of the operation of the Spirit: in prophecy, in the life and witness and worship of the Church, in bestowing new birth in the baptismal water, in sanctification, and in the maintenance of truth against false doctrines.6

1 2 3 4 5

ib. ib. ib. ib. ib.

11. 16. 21. 31. 29.

X-

V THE ALEXANDRIAN THEOLOGIANS OF THE THIRD CENTURY In strong contrast with the Latin theology of the third century there stands the characteristic thought of the Alexandrian school whose earliest representative, apart from vague traditions concerning Pantaenus and other ‘elders’ to whom he was indebted, is Clement. Clement can, it is true, occasionally echo the ideas of Tertullian, making the ‘canon of truth’ or ecclesiastical tradition the norm for the interpretation of scripture, and holding that since the Logos himself has descended from heaven there is no need to run to Athens in pursuit of human wisdom.1 Yet Clement's approach to the question of authority in religion is generally very different from Tertullian’s. He concerns himself very little with the hierarchically organ¬ ized Church and its successions of accredited teachers passing on the apostolic doctrine in the apostolic sees; and, so far from professing to regard Greek philosophy as a primary source of heresy, with which ‘Jerusalem’ has nothing in common, Clement, himself a very widely read scholar whose writings bristle with quotations from the classical poets and philosophers, welcomes it as a propaedeutic by which men’s minds are trained to receive the full truth revealed by Christ. He is careful to explain that not every philosophy is simply to be accepted without more ado; the right philosophy is Platonism, and this chiefly because it teaches, or is consonant vvith, belief in monotheism, a doctrine of creation and the providential ordering of the universe.2 Clement knows that some, indeed the majority, are afraid of Greek philosophy and run away from it as from a bogey;3 but he argues with those who think that it is of the devil, reminding them that the devil can transform himself into an angel of light; if the devil prophesies as an angel of light what he says in that role must be true, and if he should utter philosophical truths they, too, are by no means thereby falsified. On the contrary, philosophy was divinely given to the Greeks as their own par¬ ticular covenant, a fact that remains true even though the devil has sown tares among the wheat both of Christianity (heresies) and philosophy (atheistic and providence-denying systems such as Epicureanism).4 It was given, in fact, to the Greeks as a preparation for the coming of Christ and the calling of the Christian community, just as the Law was given to the Jews for the same purpose.5 The knowledge of truth gained by the philo1 2 3 4 5

str. 7.16.94-95; prot. str. 1.19.92. ib. 6.10.81. ib. 6.8.66-67. ib. 6.18.159; 1-5-28.

11.112.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

65

sophers was incomplete and partial,1 yet, ‘even if Greek philosophy does not grasp the greatness of the truth, and is still without strength to perform the Lord’s commandments, yet it does nevertheless prepare the way for the supremely royal teaching’.2 Clement, it is true, follows the conventional line of Christian apologetic in claiming that the Hebrew scriptures represent a far older philosophy than that of any Greek philosophical school,3 and that the distinctive tenets of Platonism and some of those of Stoicism were borrowed from that source; and he puts this idea even more bluntly: the philosophers were plagiarists who ‘stole’ their ideas from Moses and the prophets.4 Nevertheless, Clement is sincere in his belief that the universal Logos has provided philosophy as an introduction to the way of perfection through the teaching of Christ, and that this illustrates the fact that although there is one way of truth, yet many streams flow into it from different directions, as though into an ever-flowing river5 — a sentiment which is rare enough among the early Christian writers to mark out Clement as a thinker of remarkable insight and breadth of sympathy. Clement’s writings, however, are very far from being systematic treatises. They consist of introductions to Christian faith and life, and miscellaneous reflections on these subjects, leading up to his conception of the ideal advanced believer: the ‘Gnostic’. This ‘Gnostic’s’ form of Christianity bears a considerable outward resemblance to that of the various Gnostic sects for it is highly intellectualized, knowledge is on the whole a higher stage of communion with God than faith, esoteric and unwritten tradition plays a not unimportant role in it, and salvation tends to be seen primarily in terms of illumination. On the other hand it differs essentially from the heretical gnosis in that the object of the ‘Gnostic’s’ knowledge is quite differently conceived: God and the world and man’s relationship to God and the world are by no means thought of in the same way. In working towards his picture of the Christian ‘Gnostic’, or, as perhaps we should rather say, the ‘gnostic Christian’, Clement touches on many aspects of Christian thought, but makes few important contributions to the development of doctrine. His theological starting-point is the trans¬ cendence and ineffability of God. He quotes Plato:6 ‘To find the Father and Maker of this universe is a hard task, and it is impossible for one who has found him to tell of this to the multitude. For it can in no way be spoken of like the other objects of knowledge’; and he comments on this by means of an analogy with the ascent of Moses, alone and unaccompanied by the people, into the cloud ‘where God was’. This signifies that God is invisible and ineffable, concealed from sight by the multitude’s ignorance and dis¬ belief. St. John’s phrase ‘the bosom of the Father’ symbolizes the invisibility and ineffability of God, whom some call ‘depth’. The first cause of all things is beyond all the logical categories of description; God transcends even the notions of ‘the whole' or ‘the one’, and in calling God ‘one’, or ‘good’, or 1 1 3

ib. ib. ib.

6.10.83; 6.18.160. 1.16.80. 1.21.101, etc.

ib. 5.1.9-10. ib. 1.5.28-29. Timaeus 28C, a favourite

4 e.g., 5 8

citation with Christian writers.

A History of Christian Doctrine

66

‘mind’ or ‘Father’, or ‘God’, or ‘Creator’ or ‘Lord’ we are not applying to him an actual name but employing the best terms we can in our insoluble difficulty, so that our mind may have some basis to rest on. God, in fact, is inaccessible to every mode of human knowledge, and can be known only in so far as he discloses himself by grace through the Logos who is from him.1 In himself God is ‘one and beyond the one and above monad (oneness) itself, transcending present, past and future as “he who is’’ ’;2 but he is revealed by his Logos, the Son who is wisdom and knowledge and truth. He can express the inexpressible God. Into him as one entity all the powers of the spirit are gathered up into unity and comprised in the Son who comprehends the idea of each of the powers.3 Clement’s thought here is that the revelation of God is communicated through the Son or Logos who contains within himself the archetypal ideas. This conception recurs in Clement's allegorical exegesis of Gen. 22:3ff. On the third day, which stands for the illumination of the mind by the Word, ‘the Teacher who rose on the third day’, and also for the believer’s illumination by the ‘seal’ of baptism, Abraham looked up and saw the place afar off; from afar, because the place is hard to reach, being God, whom Plato calls the place of the ideas.4 So, too, Clement identifies the truth which, according to Jn. 14:6, is the Logos, with Plato’s idea of truth.; and the idea, Clement says, is God’s thought or concept, that is, his Logos.5 Thus the Logos is the mediator between the utterly transcendent One which is God, and the world of which he contains, as it were summed up in himself, the archetypes and the spiritual powers which motivate and govern it. The Spirit is the light of truth (the Logos being truth), true light without shadow, distributed without division to those who are sanctified through faith, bringing them knowledge of reality.6 Thus Clement’s Trinity is the traditional Christian triad of Father, Son and Holy Spirit reinterpreted along Platonist lines in terms of the communica¬ tion, or ‘broadening down’, of God from the Unknown to the immanent illuminating Spirit who makes known to men’s rational souls the truth revealed by the Logos, the bridge, as it were, by which the One passes over to the many. In many respects Clement’s Trinity bears a close resemblance to the Neo-Platonist triad of the One, Nous (Mind) and the World Soul. There is an inherent kinship between the Logos and the rational mind of man, existing by virtue of creation. God’s Logos is his image, and the divine Logos is the authentic Son of his mind [nous), the archetypal light of light, and man is the image of the Logos. Man is logikos, possessing a mind [nous) which is made in the image and likeness of God.7 Man’s mind is thus an image of God’s image,8 and this fact serves Clement as a basis on which to build a natural theology. All men, and especially philosophers and poets, possess a kind of infused effluence of the divine, and to this is to be 1 str. 5.12.78-82. 2 paed. 1.8.71. 3 str. 4.25.156. 4 ib. 5.11.73* 5 ib. 5.3.16. 6 ib. 6.16. 138. 7 prot. 10.98. 8

str.

5.14.94.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

6?

ascribed their often involuntary testimony to the one eternal and ingenerate God.1 This belief, similar to Justin’s though more fully elaborated, does not conflict with the traditional doctrine that man is fallen and sinful. Sinless¬ ness, which Clement is inclined to equate with the freedom from the passions {apatheia) which was the goal of Stoic ethics, belongs solely to the incarnate Logos, who alone is wholly free from passions;2 man, on the other hand, was subjected to sickness, destruction and death.3 Like his predecessors, Clement lays great stress on human free will, and regards the original condition of Adam as being childlikeness, with the possibility of develop¬ ment for good or ill. Where Clement differs from them is in seeking to identify the sin of Adam with sexuality, and thus to link original sin with ‘pleasure’, though it has to be observed that Clement denies Gnostic ideas concerning the inherent evil of sex and tries to confine his suggestion to the notion that intercourse was illicit, in the sense that it was not yet permitted by God when Adam fell, and that the fall therefore consisted in disobedience rather than sex as such.4 Not that one can use the term 'original sin’ without some qualification, for Clement is clear that a child which has done nothing cannot be reckoned to be under the curse of Adam but is free from sin.5 It is something more like ‘original passions’, upsetting man’s rational apatheia, which Clement thinks has been transmitted from Adam. As regards the generation of the Logos, Clement lays stress upon the unity of the Logos with the Father. ‘The Son is in the Father and the Father in the Son’;6 the Father is not without the Son, and to believe in the Son one must know the Father to whom the Son exists, and to know the Father one must believe in the Son because the Son of God teaches; the Father leads one on from faith to knowledge through the Son.7 The Son is the timeless beginning, without beginning, of all creation;8 he was the Father’s counsellor before the foundation of the world, and Wisdom and Word before all the things that were made.9 Yet it is not clear that Clement intends to propound the view that the generation of the Logos is itself eternal, as against the theory that had hitherto been current of a ‘begetting’ of the eternal and immanent reason of God for the purpose of creation. The allusions to the Logos being ‘timeless’ and ‘without beginning’ are com¬ patible with the latter view, and in at least one place Clement speaks of the Logos ‘coming forth’.10 A fragment on I Jn. 1:1 preserved in a Latin version does certainly state the idea of eternal generation unequivocally, but the authenticity of this passage is uncertain.11 He does undoubtedly hold prot. 6.68. paed. 1.2.4. 3 prot. 11.114; paed. 1.9.83. 4 str. 3.17.102-3; prot. 11.hi. 5 str. 3.16. 100; 4.25.160. 6 paed. 1.7.53. 7 str. 5.1.1. 8 ib. 7.1.2. 9 ib. 7.2.7. 10 e.g., ib. 5.3.16. 11 Potter p. 1009, G.C.S. vol. 3, 1

2

p. 210.

A History of Christian Doctrine

68

a strong doctrine of the Logos as an actual hypostasis, not to be imagined to resemble a spoken word which has no concrete subsistence, ‘The Logos of the Father of the universe’, he says, ‘is not the logos prophorikos (which Theophilus had asserted the Logos to have become by virtue of his being “put forth’’), but the most manifest wisdom and goodness of God, an almighty and, in reality, divine power’.1 He is also clear that the persons of the Trinity can be spoken of as distinct hypostases: ‘One is the Father of the universe, one the Logos of the universe, and the Holy Spirit is one and the same everywhere.’2 In his Christology Clement follows lines of thought which were by now traditional: the Logos appeared to men, the one who was both God and man3 and hence the mediator between God and man,4 ‘begetting himself’ when he became flesh,5 being born, suffering and dying in the flesh.6 7 A somewhat docetic-sounding passage concerning the freedom of the incarnate Logos from human emotions and appetites is probably due less to any Christological motive than to Clement's ascetical preoccupation with the' ideal of apatheiaA In soteriology, too, Clement offers little that is original. He concentrates attention chiefly on the revelatory work of the incarnate Logos, but he has some fine statements of the breadth of the love which has been extended to suffering and helpless mankind: ‘He conformed himself to our weakness to enable us to gain his strength, offered himself like a sacri¬ ficial libation and gave himself as a ransom, and left to us a new covenant; he reveals God to man, causes corruption to cease, conquers death, recon¬ ciles disobedient sons to the Father: educates, admonishes, saves, guards, and promises the kingdom of heaven as the reward of discipleship.8 In his ideas about salvation it could be said that Clement ‘realizes’ the eschatology of Irenaeus. For both these writers the goal of salvation is the attainment of likeness to God, a likeness that transcends the natural relationship to God given to man in creation, for it is a participation in divine qualities, bestowed by pure grace. Irenaeus had identified the likeness with the indwelling of the Spirit in every believer, and held that its eschato¬ logical fulfilment would be incorruptibility in the resurrection life. Clement, however, identifies likeness or assimilation (homoiosis) to God with knowl¬ edge (gnosis), and his ideal ‘gnostic’, being a son of God by adoption, is a ‘god’ even in this life.9 In his vision of Christian perfection gnosis is more prominent than incorruptibility, for Clement believes that the soul possesses a natural immortality; it was created with the gift of incorruptibility. Knowledge means assimilation, for patristic theology assumes as an axiom the philosophical principle that like is apprehended by like; knowledge both implies likeness between the knower and the known and also creates it. By str. 5.1.6. paed. 1.6.42. 3 prot. 1.7. 4 paed. 3.X.2. 5 str. 5.3.16. 6 ib. 6.15.127. 7 ib. 6.9.71-2. 8 q.d.s. 37; prot. 9 str. 7.16. 1

2

1.6.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

6g

knowledge of God man is transformed into the likeness of God; indeed, knowledge of God is identical with union with God. In its intellectual aspect gnosis is assimilation to the divine through contemplation; morally it is assimilation to the divine through freedom from the passions (apatheia) and love [agape). Since only the advanced Christian is able to receive true gnosis, Clement’s hope of salvation is certainly elitist. It does not, however, represent a total transformation of the early Christian into a Platonist understanding of man’s destiny. Assimilation to God means the closest communion with him, but it does not mean absorption into the One, nor the obliteration of the distinction between creature and creator; for Clement has no doubt that the soul belongs to the created order and is not to be identified with the divine. Further, although salvation is the fullness of gnosis (in the sense of contem¬ plation) rather than deliverance from death and corruption, the resurrection of the body is maintained by Clement as part of the traditional Christian belief, although in his scheme of salvation it is really an anomaly. There is, too, the remarkable combination of freedom from the passions with love. This is often said to illustrate the difference between Christian apatheia and the 'detachment’ cultivated in Stoicism. Yet it is not fully clear whether Clement’s agape means the love of the soul for God alone, for which deliverance from the passions is the necessary preparation, or whether it also includes love of one’s neighbour. Clement may here illustrate a tension within early Christian ideas of salvation; although every writer recognizes that the fruit of the Spirit is love, salvation, interpreted as the deification of the human soul (or of the human mixture of soul and body) tends in fact to be thought of as a solitary process of the perfecting of the individual. Even so brief and selective a glance at Clement’s theology illustrates some of the characteristic elements in the Alexandrian combination of biblical and Platonist religion. Origen approaches the problems of theology with similar presuppositions, but besides differing from Clement in being a systematic thinker, the first Christian to construct an integrated body of doctrine intended as a positive exposition of truth and not primarily as apologetics or polemics, he is also by far the most original theologian that the early Church produced: indeed, his is the most remarkable and interest¬ ing mind that we encounter during the whole patristic period up to Augustine. Origen enters upon his work of theological construction fully aware that God is incomprehensible and beyond the scope of human thought. Man’s reason, made the less keen through its embodiment in flesh and blood, can no more perceive the nature of God than a person whose eyes can scarcely bear the flicker of a lantern could gaze directly into the sun.1 He recognizes, too, that his enquiry lies within two distinct fields, in one of which truth is given to the theologian on the authority of revelation whereas in the other problems remain unsolved and the way is open for original speculation; though such speculation uses scripture as the area of enquiry. The former is represented, generally speaking, by the beliefs enshrined in the rule of faith. They rest upon the authority of the apostolic preaching, handed down 1 princ.

1.1.5.

A History of Christian Doctrine

?o

in the Church’s tradition derived from the apostles by succession. But while the unity of the operation of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament prophets and the apostles of the New Testament, for example, is part of the authori¬ tative preaching, the question whether the Spirit is begotten or unbegotten, or whether he should himself be reckoned as Son of God, is not. The soul’s freedom, too, is laid down in the accepted doctrinal tradition in opposition to astrological fatalism; but questions about the origin of the soul have never been so decided. It is part of the Church’s preaching that the world was created from a definite point of time and that it will in time be dissolved; it remains an open question what may have preceded this universe of ours and what may come after it.1 This is how Origen's task presented itself to him as he began his major work On First Principles (De Principiis) which for the most past survives only in Latin translation somewhat tendentiously edited. Not that he observed the distinction with any great precision; he evidently feels it his duty not only to speculate where the questions seemed to be open but also to do a considerable amount of reinterpretation of the traditional teaching of the Church (the uniformity and definiteness of which he is in any case inclined to exaggerate in the passage just mentioned). Like Clement, Origen regards philosophy as an ally in the quest for knowledge of God, provided always that it is the right kind of philosophy. Some philosophers, he observes, agree with Christianity in asserting divine creation, and some of them add that God created the world and governs it through his Logos; but philosophy is an enemy to Christianity wdien it assigns to matter or to the universe the same eternity that is rightly predicated of God and when it denies, or sets limits to, divine providence. Like Isaac and Abimelech, Christianity and philosophy are sometimes at peace, sometimes at war.2 The chief guide for Origen’s great enterprise of theological exploration is scripture as interpreted according to certain vitally important principles which, he believes, afford the key to understanding what the Holy Spirit who inspired the scriptures seeks to communicate. The main principle is that the scriptures must not be read in their literal sense alone; they contain a deeper and inward significance, a ‘spiritual’ or ‘inner’ meaning, which lies, as it were, beneath the outward, that is to say the literal or historical sense. Origen complains bitterly that Jewish exegesis is absurdly pedestrian: the Jews interpret scripture according to the letter, not the Spirit. This would seem, superficially, to be a very ridiculous charge, for Jewish exegesis was far from literalistic and Origen himself was greatly indebted to it, deriving a very great deal of his allegorical interpretation from Philo and a substantial amount from rabbinic tradition (as, for example, in the symbolic meanings which he loves to find in Hebrew proper names, where his interpretations sometimes differ markedly from Philo’s and are paral¬ leled in rabbinic Judaism). What he means, however, is that Jewish exegesis naturally failed to interpret the Hebrew scriptures as books which, when their inner meaning had been discovered, were found to be books about 1 2

ib. i proem. 1-7. hom. 14.3 in Gen.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

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Christ, and that it issued in actual observance of the precepts of the Law instead of treating these for the most part as symbolic of spiritual realities. He himself sets out a threefold method of exegesis, corresponding to the tripartite division of man into body, life-principle (psyche), and spirit, and scripturally warranted by the text, ‘Write them down in a threefold way with counsel and knowledge’ of Prov. 22:20. The bodily sense is the literal, the ‘psychic’ is the use of the text as a moral allegory for edification, such as St. Paul’s use of Dt. 25:4 in I Cor. 9:9-10, and the spiritual sense discloses teaching about Christ, the gospel and the Church.1 Origen is not precisely or entirely consistent in his application of these principles. For the most part he is content to distinguish the outward or literal sense from the inner or spiritual. The latter may be typological, pointing to the correspondence between God’s dealings with man in the Old Testament and in the New and so reading Christ and the Church out of the Old Testament, or allegorical, illustrating spiritual truths and moral lessons, on the lines made familiar by Philo. Sometimes Origen suggests that the literal sense is a necessary step towards the full meaning of a passage and that it must be taken seriously,2 and at times, as in his homily on the story of the witch of Endor, he defends a strictly literal interpretation against the freer and more imaginative exegesis of others. But here the choice lies only between different versions of the ‘outward’ sense; no typological or alle¬ gorical meaning is in question, and for the most part he sits very loosely indeed to the plain meaning of the text, giving the impression that only a very naive and uninstructed Christian would pay any attention to it. In a number of cases, he claims, the literal sense is impossible, and it was never intended that it should be taken at its face value; in some of these a literal interpretation would be altogether shocking and unworthy of God (the story of Lot’s daughters is an instance), and these examples serve as a reminder that what seems to be a descriptive account of ‘marriages, pro¬ creation, wars and all sorts of histories really consists of types’.3 Even in the narratives of the Gospels Origen finds a fertile field for allegorical interpretation. The text provides types or mysteries; that is, it points beyond itself to divine truths which it serves partly to mediate and partly to conceal. Origen’s Platonism disposes him to see the ‘letter’ as an outward form, a husk which has to be cracked open and removed in order to reach the spiritual truth imprisoned within it. This means in practice that Origen’s ingenious imagination has free scope; and he recognizes that to discern the authentic meaning of a passage is difficult and that exegesis must often be tentative. Hence he often indicates various alternative possibilities sug¬ gested by himself or by others. Just as Origen’s Platonism causes him to see the plain meaning of scripture as a kind of disguise in which the inner truth presents itself, so it makes him interpret the Christian sacraments along somewhat similar lines. This is especially true of his eucharist theology; with regard to baptism Origen tends to reproduce traditional teaching about union with Christ in 1 2 3

princ. 4.2.1-17. ib. 4-2.5. ib. 4.2.2.

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death and resurrection,1 the descent of the Spirit on the believer,2 and liberation from the tyranny of the devil,3 and it is only occasionally that he suggests that the external rite is but an outward sign or symbol of a spiritual reality in comparison with which the sacrament as such is of small account.4 In the case of the eucharist, however, this tendency comes out clearly. At times he uses ‘realist’ language about the eucharist elements, like all early Christian writers. Thus he says that we receive the Lord’s body, and that by prayer the eucharistic gifts ‘become a certain holy body’.5 On the other hand he also shows that not only does he regard the bread and wine as outward and material signs pointing to an inner and spiritual reality, but that he interprets the ‘body and blood of Christ’ which they signify as being themselves symbolical of the life-giving truth which the Logos im¬ parts. Hence it is the word which is spoken over it rather than the actual bread which benefits the recipient; the former, the prayer of faith, bestows spiritual discernment, the latter goes into the belly; so we do not lose any benefit merely by not partaking of the consecrated bread, nor do we receive any abundant benefit by merely eating it.6 ‘The bread which God the Logos proclaims to be his body is the word which feeds our souls . . . The drink which God the Logos proclaims to be his blood is the word . . . The body and blood of God the Logos can be nothing else but the word which nourishes and the word which makes glad the heart . . . The bread is the word of righteousness by eating which our souls are nourished; the drink is the word of the knowledge of Christ according to the mystery of his birth and passion.’7 Origen is prepared to go so far as to maintain, in commenting on the story of the Last Supper: ‘Let this bread and the cup be understood by the more simple people according to the more general acceptation of the eucharist; but by those who have been trained to a deeper understanding let it be interpreted as referring to the more divine promise, the promise of the nourishing word of truth.’8 This last passage illustrates Origen’s tendency to treat both word (of scripture) and sacraments as, at best, visual aids for simpler folk, who depend upon the senses, as contrasted with those more advanced believers who have the capacity (the ‘spiritual senses’ which he enumerates at length in his Dialogue with Heracleides)9 to grasp the spiritual truth communicated by the Logos. It also indicates how easy it was for Origen to come close to thinking that Jesus Christ is, in the last resort, a similar outward guise serving both to communicate (to earth-bound mortals) and in a measure to conceal the heavenly Logos, and how, without going to such extremes as that, he did certainly regard the purpose of the Incarnation as being primarily to reveal the Logos as teacher and revealer of the mysteries of God. 1

hom. 19.14 in Jer.

3

hom.

2 hom. 22.27 in Lc.

5.5 in Ex. Rom. 5.8; set. in Ezech. 16.9. e.g., hom. 13.3 in Ex.-, Cels. 8.33. comm, in Mt. 11.14. comm. ser. in Mt. 85. Jn. 32.24. dial. 11-28.

4 e.g., 6 6 7 8 9

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Thus, when Celsus asserts that God is unattainable by reason Origen draws a distinction: God is certainly not attainable by the reason that is in us, but God is attainable by the Logos that was with God and was God, and is comprehended also by any man to whom the Logos reveals the Father.1 God is mind, and is simple, invisible and incorporeal; or rather, God is beyond being itself. This Platonist assertion2 is required by the notion of participation; God ‘is participated in, rather than participates; and he is participated in by those who possess the Spirit of God’. God therefore does not even participate in being (an assertion of Celsus with which Origen, subject to queries and qualification, agrees).3 God is absolutely one and simple,4 simple spiritual nature admitting of no superiority or inferiority in himself, but in every respect monad ‘and as I might say ‘‘henad” being himself mind and the source from which the totality of spiritual and intel¬ lectual nature is derived. Yet God5 may be known by natural theology: not directly, any more than the sun can be seen directly, but only by inference from the brilliance of its rays shining on to windows; but the design of the universe and the works of providence serve like the sun’s rays, and thus enable us to infer the Father of the universe from the beauty and order of the created world.6 This presupposes the creative and revelatory work of the Logos; and Origen’s version of the Logos doctrine, which is both interesting and im¬ portant for its effect upon the subsequent development of theology, is motivated and controlled by a strong cosmological interest derived from the Platonist background of his thought. Like Clement, Origen thinks of the Godhead as subsisting at different levels; there is, so to speak, a broadening down of deity from the apex of the divine hierarchy where the Father is the source, himself participating in no higher stage of divine being, from which deity at every level is derived, and descending in an order of participation and of functional subordination through Logos and Spirit to the archetypal ideas which are contained in the Logos, and so by the process of derivation to all spiritual and rational beings, the logikoi who, in so far as they partici¬ pate in the Logos, may properly be called ‘gods’. Origen’s cosmology, in the light of which his more specific doctrine of the relation of the Logos to the Father has to be understood, requires him to believe that God must always have a universe related to himself. God is unchanging; his attributes do not cease to be exercised; and the beneficence of the Creator and his providential care, which are his eternal qualities and operations, could not become inactive. Nor could God be said to be omnipotent if he had no object upon which to exercise his sovereign power. It follows that there has been a created world (not necessarily this particular world) from all eternity and that there will be a created world of some kind for ever.7 This does not mean that the universe is a second uncreated principle alongside God. On the 1 2 3 4 5 8 7

Cels. 6.65. ib. 7.38 (Plato Rep. Cels. 6.64. Jn. 1.20. princ. r.1.6. ib. ib. 1.4.3-4; 1.2.10.

509B).

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contrary, it, or possibly a succession of universes, exists by virtue of the divine creativity and providence, continually exercised towards it. It is contingent and wholly dependent, but linked with the Creator through his direct image, the Logos, the rational creation which has been created as ‘images of the image’,1 and the descending order of participation in, and communion with, the transcendent Father. It follows from this unchanging pattern of relations that the primary and archetypal relation, that between the Father and the Logos, should be eternal. It is thus in this wider context of the eternal relations between God and the rational (logikos) creation that Origen’s belief in the eternal generation of the Logos has to be seen. Unlike the Apologists and Tertullian who envisaged two stages in the existence of the Logos, first as the reason conceived within the mind of God and then as the expressed reason or uttered Word, Origen holds the ‘external’ relationship to be without beginning. To assert a beginning, that is to say to imagine a stage when the Logos had not yet been generated, is impossible: it would imply either that God had been unable to do what afterwards he did, or that he was unwilling to do it.2 The generation is eternal and sempiternal, like the generation of brightness from light.3 Origen does indeed call the Logos a ‘creature’, and ‘firstborn of all creation’; but this is because he is using scriptural termino¬ logy (he quotes the standard proof-text for the Logos or Wisdom as a creature, Prov. 8:22), and in the same short passage, a fragment of the original Greek, he points out that since God is light (I Jn. 1:5) he can never have been without the emission of light, the ‘brightness of his glory' (Heb. 1:3), and so there ‘was never when he (Wisdom-Logos, the image of God) was not’.4 Thus Origen denies one of the main thesis of Arius in advance, and he uses the same argument elsewhere when he says that just as light can never exist without producing its effulgence, so Wisdom, being an effulgence of everlasting light (Wisd. 7:26) is eternally generated. The Saviour is Wisdom and is therefore generated eternally by the Father; and the believer who possesses the Spirit of adoption is by God’s action able to become an eternally generated son of God in Christ.5 As regards the manner of this generation, Origen employs the old analogy of ‘light from light’ many times.6 He points out that it is not to be likened to any corporeal process; it involves neither creation from non-existence nor a division of the divine substance; but it is like the emergence of will from mind.7 As such, it is an act of the Father’s will,8 but not a single act for the purpose of the ‘economy’, but a continuous exercise of will. This point seems to differentiate Origen’s idea of the generation of the Logos from the Plotinian theory of the relation of Nous (Mind) to the One, which in other respects it closely resembles. Nous is continuously generated from 1 Jn. 2.3. 2 princ. 1.2.2. 3 4 5 6 7 8

ib. 1.2.4. ib. 4.4.1. hom. 9.4 in Jer. e.g., princ. 1.2.7. ib. x.2.6; 4.4.1. ib.

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the One, just as the World Soul is continually generated from Nous, but not by the purposeful will of the One. Origen is careful to explain that in calling the Son Wisdom he does not mean to imply that he is a mere abstraction; on the contrary, he subsists substantially, and when he is termed Word, and such texts as Ps. 45:2 are applied to him, it must be remembered that they do not imply that the Logos is like a verbally uttered word, for Logos is a figurative term like ‘vine’ or ‘door’ and must not be taken literally. The fact that the term ‘Son’ is conjoined with it should save ‘Logos’ from being misunderstood.1 Origen tries in various ways to describe the unity between the Father and the Logos. It can be interpreted in terms of identity of operation, on the lines of Jn. 5:19; what the Father does, the Son does. As the mirror of God the divine Wisdom reflects the acts of God, but this does not mean that the Father's acts are copied by the Son, as a pupil copies a master, nor that the Son imitates in the earthly sphere what the Father does in the heavenly, but that the Son’s work is not like, but actually is, the Father’s.2 Or it can be presented through an analogy with the union of man and wife as one flesh, and of the believer with Christ as one spirit: the Saviour in his relation to the Father is neither one flesh nor one spirit, but - what is superior to both flesh and spirit - one God.3 In any case, what Origen wants to do is to avoid the monarchian error of abolishing the Son, and so in effect pre¬ venting the Father from being Father, and at the same time to avoid denying Christ’s divinity.4 What has been said above, however, concerning the generation of the Logos is enough to show that Origen recognizes a substantial unity, and when, reverting once again to the idea of the effulgence of God’s glory, he takes the allusions in Wisd. 7:25-26 (breath of God’s power and effulgence of glory) as showing that an effulgence or a breath are consubstantial (homoousios, of the same essence) with that of which they are the effluence or breath, there is no reason to doubt the authenticity in his writing of the technical term which was soon to acquire immense importance.5 Nevertheless Origen is most anxious to emphasize the distinction between Father and Logos. He wants to refute the monarchian view which would make no distinction in ‘number’ between them but postulate a unity not only of substance but of individual existence, so denying that the individu¬ ality of the Son is other than that of the Father.6 He knows that people are afraid of the implication that there could be two gods, but he insists that Father and Son differ from each other in hypostasis, that is, in their substance as individual entities or persons.7 The Father is absolutely God; this the Johannine Prologue acknowledges by prefixing the definite article, ho theos (‘The God’), whereas the Logos is not God absolutely (autotheos) and the article is not prefixed when he is called ‘God’ any more than it would 1 ib. 1.2.2; Jn. 1.24ft. 2 princ. 1.2.12. 3 dial. 3. 4 ib. 4. 5 fr. in Heb. (Migne PG. 8 7

Jn. ib.;

2.2; 10.37. cf. 2.10.

14.1308).

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be in the case of other deified beings. The Son is first of theoi (gods), above all others as being ‘the Lord the God of Gods’. The others, saints and all ‘deified’ creatures, derive their divinity from him; they are copies of the archetype. But he is the archetype, the model of all copies; only, his own deity is derived from the fountain-head, the Father, and he is the archetype because he is always with the Father and eternally beholds the ‘depth’ of the Father’s being.1 Two points stand out here: the Logos is God by derivation and so, despite being substantially one with the Father, he stands, as it were, at a lower level in the hierarchy, as mediator between the Father whom he mirrors and all creatures who derive their relation to God through him; and his derivation of deity from the Father is pictured in Platonist terms as a continual process of contemplation. In his Commentary on John, Origen discusses at length the various meanings which should be attached to the words ‘logos’ and ‘theos’ in different contexts, showing how these can be arranged in hierarchical order. This illustrates clearly how he conceives of deity being, as it were, eternally broadened down through a series of relationships (of communication and participation) from the apex or fountain-head to the rational creation at the base of the pyramid. It throws particular light on his theory of the intermediary, and mediating, status of the Logos between the Father and the many creatures who are logikoi and can rightly be termed theoi. As the logos in the logikoi is to the Logos who was in the beginning with God and is God, so the Logos who was in the beginning with God and is God is to the Father himself. As the true and absolute God (autotheos) is to the image and the images of the image, so the absolute Logos (autologos) is to the logos in every man; for, as God is the source of deity (and thus the Son is not autotheos), so the Son is the source of logos in the rational creation (and thus no angel or man could be autologos) A For these reasons Origen wants to lay the greatest possible stress on the distinct hypostatic existence of Father and Son, to the extent of using such a phrase as ‘second God’,3 and of declaring the Son to be other than the Father in respect of ousia (substance or essence), although if this were his meaning it would contradict his other statements mentioned above and it may well be that, since the technical terminology had not yet acquired precision, Origen intends only to say that the Son is distinct in his individual personal subsistence.4 Thus the Logos, in Origen’s scheme as in that of Philo, occupies an intermediate position. He is the line of communication whereby the trans¬ cendent God can be comprehended, for ‘since . . . God is mind, or transcends mind and being, and is simple and invisible and incorporeal, he is not comprehended by any being other than that made in the image of that mind’.5 He is also the actual connecting link between uncreated deity and created nature, standing himself midway between these.6 This link is provided by the fact that he contains in himself the logoi, that is the 1 ib. 2.2, IO. 2 ib. 2.3. 3 Cels. 5.39; cf. dial. 4

5 6

or. 15.1. Cels. 7.38. ib. 3.34.

4.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

77

rational principles or (Platonic) ideas, of all creatures;1 thus, whereas the Father is absolute unity the Son contains in himself the many.2 This manifold character of the Logos expresses itself in the variety of epinoiai (ideas or notions presented by different aspects) in which the Son is manifested. These, according to Origen, account for the many different titles, descriptions and metaphors applied to Jesus in the New Testament, some of which had already been predicated of the Logos by Philo: ‘firstborn from the dead’, ‘shepherd’, ‘light’, ‘resurrection’, ‘way’, ‘truth’, ‘life’, ‘door’, ‘vine’, ‘bread’, and so on. These terms indicate that he was not manifested to everyone in the same way; the Logos adapted his self-revelation to the capacities of those whom he encountered; thus chosen disciples were shown his glory as transfigured, but the crowds could not see him in that state and after the Resurrection he was not seen by them in any mode at all. Origen speculates on whether, but for the fall of man, the Logos would have revealed himself under any aspects besides wisdom, word, life and truth. Certainly he would not have been needed as physician, shepherd or re¬ deemer, and, a most important point for understanding Origen’s outlook, it would be a most blessed state of affairs if believers did not now need to know the Logos in these capacities.3 With this theory of the mediating position of the Logos is linked Origen’s understanding of his high-priestly office. The imagery of the Epistle to the Hebrews and the underlying typological interpretation of the Pentateuch is used to teach a doctrine of the mediation of the Logos between the Christian believer and God as the object of his faith and worship. Hence prayer must not be addressed to any creature, nor even to Christ, but only to the God and Father of the universe. It is, in fact, a sin to pray to Christ; but prayer must not, on the other hand, be made to the Father without the mediation of the ‘high priest’.4 It is not precisely clear just where Origen conceives the Logos or the Spirit as standing on the descending scale, as it were, of deity. He can say that the Saviour and the Spirit transcend all creatures, not in degree only but in kind, but that they are in their turn as far transcended by the Father as they themselves transcend all creatures. The Son is above all angelic hierarchies, but he is nothing in comparison with the Father; he is not the effulgence of God himself but of God’s light and glory, a mirror reflecting whatever the Father does.5 Elsewhere, on the other hand, he asserts that the fact that the Logos is the image of God’s goodness (Wisd. 7:26) places him higher above all inferior beings than the Father, by the fact of being absolute goodness, is placed above him.6 The Holy Spirit, Origen recognizes, is, like the Logos, an individual substantial entity and not an abstraction. The Spirit is not an energy, or force, of God, but an active substance, represented in scripture as acting personally;7 and such is the authority and 1 ib. 5-39-

2

3

Jn. 1.20. Cels. 2.64; Jn.

i.2off.

4 or. 15.1.

Jn. 13.25. comm, in Mt.

5 cf. 6

7 fr. 37 in Jn•

15.10.

78

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dignity of the Spirit, revealed in scripture, that in the Trinitarian formula of baptism the name of the Spirit is joined with those of Father and Son. The Spirit operated in the Creation, and scripture nowhere calls him a creature; various texts witness to his deity, such as Isa. 6:3 where the cherubim represent the Son and the Spirit, and Hab. 3:3 (LXX) where the ‘two living creatures’ have the same meaning. In the Spirit the Son’s revelation of the Father is received, but it is not through the Son but directly that the Spirit himself knows the Father. He is eternal, as one of the eternal Trinity.1 2 On the other hand (and it may well be that the theology of De Principiis has been ‘tidied up’ at this point) the Commentary on John discusses whether the Spirit is included in the ‘all things’ which came into being through the Son or whether the Spirit is ingenerate. Since Origen maintains that there are three hypostases, since the Spirit is not an in¬ substantial ‘energy’, and that there is but one ingenerate principle, he concludes that the Spirit is the chief and highest in rank of all things that came into being through the Son; that is why he is not himself termed ‘Son’, and thus it would appear that he is wise, rational, righteous, and so on, through participation in the Son’s epinoiaiA Thus Origen’s Trinity is pluralistically and hierarchically conceived, and the distinctions of hypo¬ stases pass over into distinctions of functions, for the operation of the Father is towards the entire universe, that of the Son is more restricted, being directed only to the rational creation, and that of the Holy Spirit still more limited, being confined to those who are holy.3 Yet it marks a great change from earlier Christian thinking, for Origen’s Trinity is, generally speaking, conceived of as the eternal mode of God’s being, and in no way as determined or evoked by the needs of the ‘economy’. Origen’s Christology similarly displays his profundity as a Christian thinker and at the same time the difficulty of reinterpreting the Christian tradition so as to harmonize with his philosophical presuppositions. His theory of the world of created logikoi enabled him to advance a highly original explanation of the union of deity and manhood in Christ. The Christological problem is to try to understand how the power of the divine majesty, the Word and Wisdom by which all things were created, can have existed within the limitations of the man who appeared in Judaea, how the Wisdom of God entered the womb and was born and cried like an infant, and suffered a shameful death. In some aspects he is manifested as a divine being, in others as human.4 The answer given by Origen is that whereas all rational creatures had the opportunity of participation in the Logos, every soul fell away through the wrong exercise of its free will except that soul which adhered to him inseparably and was made to be ‘one spirit’ with him. This soul, totally receptive of the Logos, is the medium through which the divine nature was able to unite itself with material flesh and as such to be born as God-man; this soul united with the Logos, together with the flesh which it assumed, is rightly termed Son of God, power of God, Christ and 1 2 3 4

princ. 1.3.1-5. Jn. 2.10. princ. 1.3.5. ib. 2.6.2.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

79

wisdom of God; and the Son of God is correspondingly termed Jesus Christ and Son of man. Here is an interesting anticipation of the idea of the interchange of divine and human properties (communicatio idiomatum, see p. 123).1 The union of the soul of Christ with the divine Logos is described as a union of adoration and participation, but it results in as close and indissoluble a fusing together of the divine and the human as that which takes place between iron and fire when the metal becomes red-hot - a simile which was to recur many times in later Christology.2 In this remarkable way Origen is able to posit a bridge between the divine and the human and to make the union of God and man something real, at a far deeper level than that of a divine being clothing himself with flesh. On the other hand, he runs into difficulty when he tries to claim unique¬ ness for this union. When St. Paul said that ‘he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit’, he was referring to all believers. The soul, with the flesh, which has come to be at one with the Logos has done so ‘in a higher and more divine way’;3 but what this means is not clearly stated except that this soul was sinless. Origen also finds it necessary to point out that the union does not mean that the divine Logos is circumscribed by humanity: the Logos does not cease to exist outside the soul and body of Jesus; his descent from heaven is not a movement in space and does not involve his heavenly throne being left empty.4 Christ is God and man: human and divine nature begin to come together in him so that by communion with deity human nature may be deified (in believers who live the life which he taught, as well as in Jesus himself).5 The Logos remains unmoved in his deity; he remains Logos in essence, and suffers nothing of the experience of the body or the soul. But ‘sometimes he comes down to the level of him who is unable to look upon the radiance and brilliance of the deity and becomes as it were flesh . . . until he who has accepted him in this form is gradually lifted up by the Logos and can look even upon, so to speak, his absolute form’.6 Thus the human emotions reflected in such texts as ‘now is my soul troubled’ are not to be ascribed to the Logos but to the human soul.7 The two natures with their respective properties are always clearly distinguished, sometimes as ‘man’ and ‘God’.8 Yet scripture does not present Christ as two but as one;9 he was a ‘composite being’;10 his human soul and body were raised to the divine level not only by communion but by union and intermixture, so that even the mortal quality of his body was changed into an ethereal and divine quality.11 For the Logos is the directing principle of the incarnate life, and the ‘divine’ sayings ascribed to Jesus, such as ‘I am the living bread', are the very 1 2

3 4 8 8 7 8 ® 10 11

ib. 2.6.3-4. ib. 2.6.6. Cels. 2.9; princ. 4.4.4. Cels. 2.9; 4.5; 4.12. ib. 3.28. ib. 4.15. princ. 4.4.4. Jn. 10.6; 1.28. ib. 1.28. Cels. 1.66. ib. 3.41.

8o

A History of Christian Doctrine

words of the Logos.1 Origen somehow conceives of the Logos as it were discarding and apportioning the elements of his human nature at his death: his body to the grave, his soul to Hades, his spirit resigned to the Father from whom he reclaims it in the ascension of which he spoke to Mary in the garden;2 and he thinks that at the Resurrection Jesus was in an inter¬ mediate state between the corporeality of the earthly body and the con¬ dition of a disembodied soul.3 These and similar ideas clearly indicate that although his theory of the human soul of Christ gave him an opportunity to avoid many of the difficulties inherent in Christologies which worked only with the concepts of Logos on the one hand and flesh on the other, he still failed to take the humanity with complete seriousness. This was because his Platonism caused him to take the Incarnation itself insufficiently seriously; it tended to seem to him in the last resort rather like a concession made by the Logos to those weaker human beings who could not bear to receive his direct revelation of himself unveiled. This idea seems to underlie his simile of the statue so huge as to fill the whole world, which therefore cannot serve its purpose of making known its subject since no one can see it properly; only when a miniature copy has been made, adjusted to the capacity of human observers, can the grandeur of God be conveyed to them.4 So in the Incarnation Origen tends to see the divine Logos cut down to human size rather than exalted in the glory of self-giving love. This tendency is reflected to some extent in his treatment of the redemp¬ tive work of Christ, which is primarily seen as the revelatory activity of the Logos illuminating men’s minds, bringing them out of darkness into light, and enabling them through participation in himself to share in his trans¬ formed humanity and be exalted in him to fellowship with God. The human life and death are thus thought of primarily as channels of illumination. At the same time there are many passages in Origen where the traditional images of sacrifice, ransom, expiation and the defeat of the devil are introduced and explained. For instance, after carefully explaining that it was a man who died for the people (Jn. 11150) and that the Truth, Wisdom, Peace and Righteousness is not a man, that the Logos did not die, since God’s image is not subject to death, and that it was Jesus as man who died, Origen goes on to say that this man, the purest of living beings, was able to bear the sin of the world, taking it upon himself and destroying and annul¬ ling it, since he knew no sin and thus could become an expiation, a sacrifice offered to avert demonic wrath, for the whole world.5 Similarly, Origen tells Celsus that Christ’s death is like that of those righteous men who are believed by the pagans to have died voluntarily for the community to avert by expiation the activities of evil demons who would otherwise have brought plague or famine. Jesus died to destroy the ruler of demons who held all men’s souls in bondage.6 His death has not only offered an example of how to die for the sake of religion but begun the overthrow of the devil’s 1 2 3 4 5 6

ib. 2.9. dial. 6ff. Cels. 2.62. princ. 1.2.8. Jn. 28.18. Cels. 1.31.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

81

dominion; the proof is the number of people who have been freed from the devil and enabled to devote themselves to God and to progress in spiritual life.1 Origen does in fact lay as much emphasis on Christ’s death and resurrection as on the defeat of the devil,2 only adding to the ideas of his predecessors the notion that Christ offered his life to the devil as a ransom in exchange for man, and that the devil, having exceeded his rights in seeking to hold the one who was sinless, was deprived of his prey by the resurrection.3 This theory of a kind of treaty or commercial bargain, however, plays but a very small part in Origen’s thought. The situation which the work of Christ remedied is seen very differently by Origen from the way in which it had previously been understood. His belief in the pre-existence of rational souls means that the fall of man is transferred from the ‘historical’ setting of Eden to a supra-mundane sphere. The Adam story is much used by him, but he treats it, in the last resort, as a parable or a Platonic myth. God created rational creatures as pure spirit; they were therefore equal and alike, there being no cause for diversity among them. They were endowed with free will and had the opportunity either of making progress in communion with God or of falling away. Origen is most insistent on the freedom of the human will. Any kind of predestinarian language, including much in the scriptures that he finds himself obliged to explain away, seems to him to encourage pagan fatalism and Gnostic determinism. Thus the fact that all souls, except that which the Logos was to unite with himself, fell away was due solely to their misuse of their freedom. Through this alienation from God the soul, which was by origin pure spirit, has become ‘refrigerated’ into psyche (which Origen fancifully derives from the root of psychros, ‘cold’). Those supra-human intelligences that fell became demons; the human souls entered the material world as a place of punishment, or, rather, of corrective training,4 for Origen holds that life in this visible world is really all part of purgatory, continuous with that process of purification and education which awaits the soul after death, and it is as a training-ground that the soul, embodied as a human being, must use its mortal life. The clothing of souls with flesh for this purpose is mythically portrayed in the ‘coats of skin’ which God made for Adam and Eve. Origen compares this myth with that of the soul’s loss of its wings in Plato’s Phaedrus; they denote both the corporeal character of man’s life on earth and also the diversity which this entails.5 In one sense the believer has already been saved through Christ’s offering of himself as a propitiatory sacrifice to avert God’s wrath and his rescue of mankind from the devil who had gained the mastery over him through sin.6 But this is only the beginning of the process of salvation. Indeed, to know Christ as redeemer is only a rudimentary form of faith, suitable for the simpler Christian.7 God’s will for the soul is its transformation into the 1

ib.

7.17.

comm, in Mt. 12.40; Jn. 6.55ff. comm, in Mt. 16.8. princ. 2.9.1-6; 1.8.1. Cels. 4.40; princ. 2.1.4. Rom. 3.8; horn. 24.1 in Num.; comm, in Mt. Jn. 2.3.

1 e.g., 3 4 * * 7

16.8;

Rom.

2.13.

A History of Christian Doctrine

82

divine image through knowledge of himself, that is, its deification. Deifica¬ tion is attained through following the Logos as teacher,1 and the advanced Christian participates in the Logos not merely through having been created as a rational being (logikos), but by becoming fit, through purification and through rising above all material things, to receive the divine gift of perfect knowledge of God.2 This is no less than a sharing in that contemplation of the Father through which the Logos himself derives his eternal deity.3 The Logos is thus the archetype of all the ‘gods’ of Psalm 82:6, who are souls deified by the vision of God and formed into the likeness of their archetype. Thus purification, according to Origen’s ascetic teaching which greatly influenced the monastic movement, passes over into contemplation or knowledge which is unitive; so by union with God the ‘cold’ soul is ‘re¬ heated’. The end of salvation is contemplation of the Father which requires no intermediary. Not only is the incarnate Christ left behind, as it were, in the progress towards deification, but in the end the Logos himself; for, as Paul stated, the Logos will hand over his kingdom to the Father and God will be all in all.4 This end will be achieved through a continuing process of purgation and illumination after death. The fire that awaits sinners destroys evil, but it is also purificatory and, like all God’s chastisements, ultimately remedial.5 Men will be assigned their due place in this process by divine judgement. In scripture the judgement is pictured as a vast assize, but Origen recognizes that this must be understood symbolically. It means that through the full illumination of all men everywhere by the manifestation (not a spatial ‘second coming’) of the Logos they will know themselves as they really are, acknowledge his authority, and, in a sense, judge themselves.6 Between death and the judgement there is an intermediate state, a training course, varying in duration with the needs of the individual soul. It is conceived of in a strikingly academic fashion as ‘a place of erudition and, as one might say, a lecture-hall and school of souls’.7 The end of God's purpose for his creation must resemble the beginning. Diversity must return into unity. The distinction between good and evil will disappear, for all will be uniformly good, and it will be as though the tree of the knowledge of good and evil had not been discovered. In Origen’s view, it must be remembered, evil is purely negative; there are degrees of being and that which fully and perfectly is {to on) is the good {to agathon).8 God will be all in all, and this means that the rational mind, purified from wickedness and cleansed from faults, will feel, think, and hold to nothing but God: God will be the mode and measure of its every thought and act.9 This is what is meant by the Pauline idea of the subjection of every enemy Cels. 3.28. ib. 6.13. Jn. 2.2. ib. 20.7. princ. 2.10.4; Cels. 5.15; hom. 1.2 in Ezech. comm. ser. in Mt. 70. princ. 2.11.6. Jn. 2.7. * princ. 1.6.1-4; 3.6.1-3.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

83

to Christ and the handing over of the kingdom to God. The clear implication, though it is nowhere stated explicitly, is that the demonic enemies and the devil will be won over by persuasion and illumination to the knowledge, and therefore to the likeness, of God; for God’s reign is established by persuasion and not coercion, and in the end there will be no creature left to defy his will. For Origen salvation is thus a complex process of ^-deification, a return to the beginning. For this reason the ultimate goal involves no abolition of the original distinction between uncreated God and created spirits. It may be partly in order to emphasise this distinction that Origen makes room in his eschatology for a resurrection of the body. Of course, he follows St. Paul in believing that the resurrection of the body (a term which, unlike Tertullian, he prefers to ‘resurrection of the flesh’) cannot mean that the soul will be involved with flesh and blood and their accompanying passions; it denotes the putting on of a spiritual body, a body fitted to minister to a soul so intimately united with God as to have become ‘one spirit’ with him: ‘a better garment for the purer, ethereal and heavenly regions’.1 In the sixth century Origen was anathematized for propounding the belief that the resurrection body would be spherical.2 This is not stated in his extant works, though like Plato (Tim. 33B) and others he thought celestial beings possessed this perfect shape. There was enough, in any case, in his original eschatology to excite the fury of traditionalists. The hope of a literal resurrection of the flesh had very naturally been upheld by Tertullian, since he believed that the soul, as well as the body, is a material object. It was polemically defended against Origenism by the violently anti-Origenist bishop of Olympus, Methodius.3 It seems, however, to be an anomaly when salvation is interpreted as deification, for it was agreed on all sides that God is not corporeal. There seem to have been three main reasons why, despite Origen’s teaching, belief in physical resurrection was tenaciously retained. It was part of the tradition, though St. Paul’s ‘spiritual body’ represents a very different concept from Tertullian’s resurrectio carnis. It was a safeguard against any tendency to suppose that salvation means the loss of personal and individual identity through a Neoplatonist absorption into the One; though this was in fact adequately secured by the acknowledged distinction between creator and creature and by the recognition that although the soul belongs to the spiritual world (kosmos noetos) it is, nevertheless, not a part of God but one of his creatures. It was also, and more importantly, a defence against Gnostic and Manichaean depreciation of the physical world and its creator. Unless the body was to shate in the soul’s salvation the way seemed open to treat it, and the material world to which it belongs, as lying outside the scope of divine creation and providence. The argument seems to turn in the end on the assumption that value is proportionate to duration. This is not self-evident, and if life in the body is, as most Christians and not Origen alone believed, a course of training for the soul’s life in the spiritual dimension, it might 1

ib.

Cels. 7.32. adv. Or. (Migne P.G.

2.10.3; 3.6.6;

2 Justinian

* See below, p. 91

.

86.973)

anath.

5; cf. Or.

or.

31.

84

A History of Christian Doctrine

seem unnecessary that the body should accompany the soul there just as it would be unnecessary for a butterfly to take to the air with caterpillar’s feet and hairs. Had the writers who argued about this subject believed that the union of soul and body is totally indissoluble, or that body was actually to be converted into soul, the position would have been different; but although some held that in this life body and soul are only theoretically separable (others thought that the soul enjoys an independent life of its own in dreams), and although some inclined towards an Aristotelian rather than a Platonist view of the soul, they agreed in fact that body and soul were two entities and that they were separated by death.

VI EASTERN THEOLOGY FROM ORIGEN TO THE COUNCIL OF NICAEA As the first fully worked out and coherent system of Christian doctrine, and as a strikingly original attempt to grapple with some of the major problems presented by the task of expressing Christian faith intelligibly in a world of thought conditioned by Greek philosophy, Origen’s work had a profound effect. Some of his more startling innovations provoked vigorous opposition and were generally rejected, but his Trinitarian theology with its pluralistically and hierarchically conceived system of relationships between the divine hypostases provided the framework for the development of theology in the Greek-speaking Church and ensured that in the East, at any rate, monarchianism and any attempt to deny the hypostatic otherness of the Logos from the Father would be seen as the main heretical enemy by conservative- and orthodox-minded Christians. The chief fear would be of Sabellianism (see p. 54). Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, one of the ablest of the followers of Origen in his .Trinitarian theology (though in his extant writings he does not acknowledge his debt to him), encountered this Sabellian bogey among the bishops of Pentapolis in Libya and wrote a letter to them protesting against the Sabellian identification of the incarnate deity with the Father. A complaint was then made against him by certain of its recipients to Diony¬ sius, bishop of Rome, who, according to Athanasius, wrote a letter in condemnation both of Sabellianism and also of the alleged opinions of his Alexandrian namesake who was supposed to have anticipated Arius in declaring the Son to be alien in essence to the Father and to be included among his creatures. In reply Dionysius set out his defence at length, and, since the alleged Arianism of his predecessor was highly embarrassing to Athanasius, the latter devoted a book to an examination of this controversy, putting the opinions of Dionysius in the best possible light and defending his statements. Dionysius was alleged to have held the view that God was not always Father; there was not always a Son. God was without the Logos and the Son was not before he was begotten: there was ‘when he was not’; ‘for he is not eternal, but came into being later’.1 Thus according to Athanasius the accusers of Dionysius believed him to have taught the same doctrine as Arius. They also said that he failed to speak of the Father when naming the Son and vice-versa, and divided, separated, and postulated a distance between the Father and the Son.2 They further charged him with including 1 Ath. 2

ib.

sent. Dion.

16.

14.

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A History of Christian Doctrine

the Son among the things which have come into being, that is, of making him a creature, and denying that he is of the same essence or substance (homoousios) with the Father; and they supported this last allegation with illustrations which he was said to have used: the Son is alien to the Father in respect of essence (ousia) just as the vinegrower is to the vine and the boat-builder to the boat.1 The letter which this evoked from Dionysius of Rome contained a head-on attack upon those who divide, cut up and destroy the monarchy of God proclaimed by the Church into three powers and separated hypostases and three deities. This is as bad as its opposite error, Sabellianism, for these people preach a kind of tritheism, dividing the divine monad into three separated and alien hypostases. The Trinity is proclaimed in the scriptures, but not three gods. Scripture likewise attests the generation of the Son, but not his creation or formation; for this would imply that he was not eternal, whereas if he is Logos and wisdom and power he must be eternal, for God could never be without these essential attributes. Those who hold such an opinion mistake the meaning of Prov. 8:22, which may have led them astray: ‘created' does not mean the same thing as ‘made’ (as Deut. 32:6 (LXX) shows), and the scriptures never speak of the Son having come into being although they say much about his generation. Therefore, the ‘wonderful and divine monad is not to be divided into three hypostases, nor is the excellence of the Lord to be diminished by the use of the term “making” (instead of “begetting”)’. The Roman bishop ends by citing ‘I and the Father are one’ and ‘I am in the Father and the Father in me’ and declares that both the divine Trinity and the holy proclamation of ‘monarchy’ are to be preserved.2 If the Alexandrian’s self-defence against this attack is to be credited, and it is hard to believe that he had ever adopted a theology which anticipated Arius rather than reflected Origen, Dionysius of Rome had been misin¬ formed. At the same time his reaction to what he had been told is important, for it illustrates the different climate of thought in which Eastern theology was developing after Origen from that which still prevailed in the Latin West. In the days of Praxeas, Noetus and other ‘monarchians’, the West, and Rome in particular (where bishops like Callistus and his predecessor Zephyrinus seem to have reacted sharply against the pluralistic Logos theology of Hippolytus) had as it were been inoculated with a large dose of theological monism - plain and scriptural rather than subtly philosophical. It made Western theologians, on the whole, highly resistant to the Arian epidemic; it also made them very deaf for a considerable period to what the pluralist theology of the Origenist tradition was saying. Hence the indigna¬ tion of Dionysius against the idea of a division of the monad into three hypostases, separated and alien from one another, indistinguishable from three gods, and against the notion of the Son as a creature. This reaction would not have been greatly different even if there had been no confusion over terminology, as there probably was: ‘hypostasis', which to the Alexan¬ drian corresponded to Tertullian’s persona and meant an individually distinct entity, might easily be assumed by the Roman to denote substantia, 1

ib.

18; 4.

2 Ath.

deer.

26.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

87

of which it was etymologically the equivalent, and to mean the essential reality of deity: to speak of three ‘substances’ would be to speak of three deities. Conversely, the Roman bishop’s extreme stress on the absolute unity of the deity evidently looked dangerously Sabellian to those who stood in the Alexandrian tradition. The treatise which Dionysius of Alexandria issued in defence of his views complained that he had been misrepresented, and that he had been under¬ stood as attributing to the Logos what in fact ought to be taken as referring to Christ’s humanity.1 He admitted that certain of his similes had been unfortunate, such as those of the vinegrower and the vine and the boat and the builder. Yet he had no intention of denying that Christ is homoousios with the Father, although he had to point out that the term itself is unscriptural; he accepts it, and adduces another of his similes to show that he has affirmed what the term denotes. This is the analogy of parents and children. They are homogeneous; the only respect in which they are ‘other’ is that the parents are not the children, and this otherness is a necessary condition for there being either parents or children. Other similar illustra¬ tions had been of homogeneous objects: seed or root and plant, river and spring, and so on. He also spoke of the Son as light kindled from light.2 These analogies, says Athanasius, plainly indicate that he never shared the beliefs of Arius. He believed that ‘Father’ eternally implies ‘Son’, that the Son is derived from the Father’s substance and not created out of nothing, that eternal light could never have been without its radiance, and so on.3 The Father,' the Son and the Spirit are indivisible: ‘we broaden out the monad into the Trinity indivisibly, and again we sum up the Trinity in the monad without diminution’.4 5 Another conflict between the dominant Origenist theology of the later third century and a form of monarchian belief is to be seen in the condemna¬ tion in 268 of the teaching of Paul of Samosata by a council of Origenist bishops at Antioch. The Christology of Paul followed the general lines of the ‘adoptionist’ teaching which had been current among various theologians since early in the century. Novatian ascribed the motive of this type of Christology to a concern for strict monotheism against the doctrine of two gods apparently implied by the orthodox belief that the Father and the Son are alike God, but distinct from one another;6 and this motive was behind monarchianism as well as adoptionist Christology. Hence in modern times the latter has been given the name ‘dynamic monarchianism’; but these two theologies are by no means the same. Adoptionism resembling that of Paul of Samosata was taught at Rome before the end of the second century by Theodotus of Byzantium, a tanner, and Theodotus of Rome, a banker, and subsequently by Artemon. It substituted for the identification of Christ with the actual divine entity of the Logos or Son incarnate the belief that Christ was a man uniquely inspired, and therefore divinized, by the 1 2 3 4 5

sent. Dion. ib. 18. ib. 18-22. ib. 17. Trin. 30.

14.

88

A History of Christian Doctrine

Spirit. What was meant by the divinization of Jesus appears to have varied as between these theologians, some thinking that he had actually been elevated to deity, others that he remained a Spirit-possessed man, or one whom the Word uniquely indwelt. In this kind of theology the Word lacks personal subsistence. The relation between Christ and God is conceived in terms of inspiration rather than incarnation, and in this context ‘Logos’ means the uttered word of God rather than an intermediary divine being or a second divine principle derived from and reflecting the first. ‘Logos’ thus tends to signify the ‘Word of the Lord’ which came to the prophets and, in a fuller measure and in a permanent relationship, came upon the man Jesus. Paul naturally emphas¬ ized the unique degree of Christ’s participation in the Word: ‘Wisdom does not dwell thus in any other. Wisdom was in the prophets . . . but was in Christ as in a temple.’1 The simile of the temple or shrine indwelt by the divine Logos was to play an important part in later Christology; Paul, however, was understood to mean, and this was probably correct, that the Wisdom or Word dwelt in Christ as an impersonal divine influence, animat¬ ing and motivating him, and not as a substantial and personal presence. It was united with him, not substantially but after the manner of a quality.2 It is at this point that Paul’s humanist Christology does make some contact with Sabellian, or ‘modalist’ monarchianism; for like the latter, but having arrived at this point by a different route, it dispensed with the hypostatic distinctions in the Godhead that were made by current Trinitarian ortho¬ doxy. If ‘Logos’ denotes an impersonal communication from God, without individual subsistence, then God is one person and the Trinitarian distinc¬ tions refer only to abstractions except in so far as the traditional terms Son and Spirit may be used with reference to the man Jesus and to the grace of God in the Church (which is how Paul is said to have used them by PseudoLeontius of Byzantium in the sixth century).3 Paul’s opponents, according to a fourth-century source, contended that the Logos is a substantial entity, an ousia and not merely a power or influence.4 It may have been in response to this that Paul made use of the term homoousios. Conflicting accounts of his reasons for doing this are given by Athanasius and Basil on the one hand, and Hilary on the other.5 According to the former account Paul used the term in an argument on these lines: ‘if Christ was not a man who became deified, then, according to you, he must have been consubstantial with the Father. But this would imply three entities: Father, Son and the antecedent ‘stuff’ (deity) of which they are: just as in the case of two coins of the same substance there are three entities, the two coins and the metal from which they are struck. Thus your doctrine postulates a divine substance anterior to the persons of the Godhead, which would be absurd’. Hilary, on the other hand, says that Paul used the term in his own theology, to signify that Father and Son are 1 de Riedmatten,

2 3

ib. 29. de sectis

3.3.

4 Epiphanius 5 Ath.

Les Actes du Proces de Paul de Samosate, fr. 6.

syn.

haer.

73.12.

45; Bas.

ep.

52.1; Hil.

syn.

81.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

89

numerically identical; God is a solitary monad. This would mean that Paul, denying a personal subsistence to the Word, reduced it to a divine ‘utter¬ ance’, in no way constituting a distinct hypostasis, and thus in no way incompatible with an extreme monistic conception of God. The Word in this sense is certainly of the same essence with the Father. Not only by reason of antecedent probability, but because Hilary seems to have had reliable evidence whereas Athanasius and Basil were confused by fourthcentury arguments relating to the post-Nicene situation, Hilary’s account should probably be preferred. The council of Antioch, led by Malchion, a philosopher, repudiated the homoousion in this sense. It is unlikely that they formally condemned the use of the term as such. Had they done so, their action would have greatly embarrassed the West which had very recently insisted on the theological importance of accepting it in the correspondence between the Dionysii. It would also have presented a serious obstacle to the adoption of the term in the creed of Nicaea, whereas in fact the question of what had happened at Antioch in 268 began to be canvassed by the opponents of the homoousion only in the middle of the fourth century (it is possible but not very likely that the events at Antioch had been forgotten in detail by 325 even though Paul was well remembered as a theological bogey). The council also rejected Paul’s Christological assertion of the separateness of the Word from the man Jesus whom the Word inspired or indwelt. He had argued that ‘the Logos was greater than Christ; for Christ became great through Wisdom. The Logos is from above; Jesus Christ is a man from here. Mary did not bear the Logos for Mary was not before the ages . . . but she bore a man like us, but greater in all respects since he was from Holy Spirit’.1 Wisdom and its ‘temple’ are two different things.2 The council insisted, against all this, that the substantial Logos was substantially united with the man, not by participation or discipleship but by the actual substance of the Logos being substantiated in a body.3 They explained this union without recourse to Origen’s ingenious doctrine of the soul of Christ. This was one of those speculative elements in Origen’s system which generally failed to win approval, and from the time of Paul of Samosata onwards to postulate a human soul in Christ tended to suggest to many people that a dichotomy was being made between the divine Logos and the man Jesus, that a sub¬ stantial union of deity and manhood centred in the divine person of the Logos was being denied, and that therefore what was generally believed to be the essential category of incarnation was being interpreted so as to bring it dangerously near to the category of inspiration. The Council of Antioch in fact asserted that the union is between the Logos and human flesh. The Logos assumes flesh; and just as every man is a composite being, of flesh and soul, so Wisdom was in Christ’s human body like the soul in ours.4 God the Logos is in him what the ‘inner man’ is in us.5 1 de Riedmatten, 2

3 4 5

ib. ib. ib. ib.

14. 36; 33. 36. 30.

fr.

26.

V

go

A History of Christian Doctrine

This reinterpretation of Origen had most important consequences. The problem of the unity of the person of Christ - how one who was God and man could properly be said to be one person: how two distinct natures each operating in its own sphere could unite in a single person - was solved quite neatly, but at the cost of reducing Christ’s humanity to bodily nature alone: almost of reducing it from human nature to animal nature. Eusebius, Arms, Athanasius, representatives of very different sides in the Arian conflict, all held this Christology, and its inherently unsatisfactory char¬ acter was not widely recognized until Apollinarius made the idea, that in Christ the Logos takes the place of the human rational soul in all other men, the centre of his theological system and provoked a reaction which caused it to be, at least in theory, abandoned. Origen’s disciple Pamphilus of Caesarea and later Eustathius of Antioch are among the most notable of the few who perceived the Christological and soteriological difficulties inherent in the apparently straightforward theory of a union between the Logos and human flesh; and it is significant that in his defence of Origen Pamphilus felt bound to admit that many were offended because Origen had maintained that Christ had assumed a human soul, and to point out in his defence that at least the idea was scriptural (e.g. Mt. 26:38, Jn. 10:18, 12:27).1 Methodius, bishop of Olympus, a leading opponent of Origen’s theology at the turn of the century, exemplifies the typical Christology of this period. There are, it is true, some peculiar elements in his thought. He carries the typology of Adam-Christ so far as to deny that it is typology at all: Christ actually is Adam, and it was proper that the first-born and first-begotten of God, the divine Wisdom, should become man by being mingled with the first-created and first-born of men.2 Hence Methodius develops the Irenaean parallel between the mode of Christ’s birth and that of Adam’s creation.3 He is following a more general tradition when he speaks of Christ as a man filled with unmixed and perfect deity, God contained in man,4 5 and of his humanity as ‘the man whom he assumed, enthroned at the right hand of the Almighty’.6 The Logos made a body which he united with deity6 so that it could become the instrument of the devil’s defeat through Christ’s death. The ‘heavenly man' wore the form of flesh that was the same as ours, and, though he was not man, he became man in order that by his death and resurrection all might be made alive in him and attain to the resurrection of that same flesh.7 The Lord raised to heaven the flesh that he wore as a glorious garment.8 Such passages are typical of the ‘Word-flesh’ Christology which had become widespread. It is not out of harmony with this idea of the person of Christ that his saving work should be understood primarily in terms of a victory over the devil, won less, perhaps, by Christ's human 1 2 8 4 5 8 7 8

apol. Or. 24. symp. 3.4. ib. ib. ib. 7.9. Porph. 1. res. 2.18. symp. 7.8.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

9i

obedience than by the inability of the devil to subject the immortal being of the Logos to death, the fruit of victory being the exaltation of human flesh to the divine level and the consequent transformation in Christ of the mortal into incorruptibility and the passible into impassibility.1 In its turn, this conception of redemption (from mortality rather than sin) is associated with two other features of Methodius’ thought: a very strong emphasis on the virtue of asceticism, and in particular of virginity, for the attainment of incorruptibility, and an extreme antipathy to Origen’s ideas about the spiritual body and the life to come. For Methodius these ideas are tanta¬ mount to a denial of resurrection. He insists on the literal and physical character of the resurrection of believers, which must be similar to that of Christ, and on the fact that it is this present flesh which is to be raised to immortality.2 This eschatology which is linked with a literalistic interpreta¬ tion of the new Jerusalem,3 is supported by a prosaic exegesis of scriptural texts, such as his discussion of the significance for the resurrection body of Mt. 8:12; the risen body must possess teeth if it is to be able to gnash them.4 Eusebius of Caesarea, who was believed in 325 to be sympathetic enough to Arius to warrant his being placed under a kind of suspended sentence of excommunication by a council held at Antioch which rejected Arianism, and who had to clear himself of this charge later in that year at Nicaea, was in fact a representative of the Origenist tradition who pushed certain aspects of Origen’s system to extreme lengths. He was certainly not an Arian, but the pluralism and subordinationism of his Trinitarian theology made him highly uneasy with what he regarded as the dangerously monistic tendency of the beliefs of Arius’ opponents. He begins his History of the Church with a revealing summary of what he holds to be the essential faith by which the Church lives. In Christ there are two modes of being: one is like the head of a body, since he is conceived of as God, the other like its feet, since he assumed human nature with passions like ours. As Logos he was the first and only begotten of God, before all creatures, the minister of the Father’s will, the second cause, after the Father, of the universe, who has received from the Father deity and power and honour. The Father rules universally by his sovereign will; the Logos, holding the second place, carries out the Father’s commands. He appeared to men in the biblical theophanies, for ‘reason does not permit that the uncreated and immutable essence of God should be changed into the form of a man'. What, then, should the Lord be called (since he may not be termed the first cause of the universe) but the pre-existent Logos? He is the power and wisdom of the Father, entrusted with the second place in the kingdom: an essence living and subsisting before the world, which ministered to the Father in the making of all created things.5 God alone is ingenerate and without beginning. He transcends the begin¬ ning of all things, is superior to any designation whatsoever, and is ineffable, 1 2 3 4 5

Porph. passim; res. res. 3.3-6; 3.12-14; symp. 9. iff. res. 1.24. h.e. 1.2.

3.23. 3.16.

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inconceivable, the first principle of all things, the one sole God from whom and for the sake of whom all things are. He created by reason of his own goodness, for his will could not but be good; and he created, not out of nothing (for Eusebius holds that non-being could not be the origin of any¬ thing, and non-being could not be the cause of anything’s subsistence) but by putting forth as a kind of material and substance for the creating of the universe his own will and power.1 The Father, the indivisible monad, is the one first principle. The Son, begotten from him, is not without beginning nor ingenerate; otherwise there would be two principles and two gods. He was begotten of the Father and has the Father as his origin and principle.2 His first-born Wisdom is absolute Mind and Logos and Wisdom (autonous, autologos, autosophia), the good offspring of the good Father, the steersman at the helm of the creation of the universe. He is begotten deity, the unique image of the ineffable God, who is in and through everything as a living law and principle.3 He must be unique, for there can be no more than the one effulgence of any one light; and to be the exact image he must not only reflect the Father’s substance but his numerical unity, that is, he must be perfectly one without multiplicity. Not that Eusebius likes the traditional analogy of the effulgence or ray and the light, for the light emits its radiance of necessity; there is nothing purposive about this, whereas the Father begets the Logos by an act of will4. Thus the Father is prior to the Son, as ingenerate to generate; and although Eusebius does not want to adopt Arianism he finds it impossible to think that the Son can be of the substance of the Father. The reason is that this would imply some kind of ‘passion’ (that is, alteration) and division in the substance of deity. For him the alternative possibility, that the Son is equally of the divine essence by virtue of co-existing with the Father from eternity, is ruled out since it would imply that there are two ingenerate first principles.5 Hence Eusebius has to explain ‘I and the Father are one’ by taking it to mean ‘one in glory’, for the Son participates in the Father’s glory which the Father imparts to him and which he in turn passes on to his disciples, following the pattern of the Father’s benevolence. Eusebius cannot allow that the Logos and the Father are one single hypostasis.6 Here, then, is an extreme presentation of the concept of a broadening down of deity so as to subsist at different levels in hierarchical order. The fact that Origen’s theory of eternal generation has been discarded, which would probably have seemed to Eusebius to be the natural concomitant of dropping the theory of the eternity of a created world, makes this theology look superficially very like Arianism; but that was by no means its intention. In Christology, Eusebius is a representative of the theory of the union of the Logos with flesh. This becomes especially clear in his discussion of the death of Christ and his resignation of the Spirit to the Father and the body 1

2 3 4 6 6

d.e. 4.1. e.th. 2.6. d.e. 4.2. ib. 4.3. ib. 5.1.20. e.th. 3.19.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

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to the tomb.1 The demonic enemies of Christ are pictured, in a remarkable exegesis of Ps. 22, as circling round the Cross like vultures or beasts of prey ready to seize their spoil, thinking that nothing was ‘tabernacling’ in the body of Jesus other than a human soul like other men’s.2 It would be unfair to say that in his ideas about the Logos and the work of Christ he is so much concerned with cosmology as to have little interest left (unlike Athanasius) for soteriology. He has in fact much to say about the saving work of Christ, listing a number of reasons for his death, revelatory, sacrificial, relating to the defeat of the devil and so on, and he has a fine exposition of Psalm 41 in which he discusses how Christ makes our sins his own in order to heal them.3 A different approach, though one which wa,s also derived from Origen, is seen in the letters of Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, one to his namesake bishop of Thessalonica and another an encyclical, sent after Arius had attacked his teaching. Alexander asserted the existence of the Logos as a distinct hypostasis, co-eternal with the Father since the Father could not ever not have been Father; hence his generation is without beginning. The ‘nature’ or ‘hypostasis’ of the Logos is intermediary, standing between God and the created order, and the Logos and the Father are two entities. These cannot be separated from one another, but ‘I and the Father are one’ is not to be taken in the sense of a single hypostasis.4 Alexander’s system is Origenistic in its emphasis on the Logos as an independent hypostasis and on the mediating status and function of the Logos. It also appears to reproduce Origen’s theology in its assertion that the generation of the Logos is an eternal relationship, but this has been detached from Origen’s com¬ plementary theory of an eternal relationship between Father, Logos and created universe, so that ‘eternal generation’ as understood by Alexander and Athanasius is very different from the same phrase as used by Origen. Alexander's statements of his belief had been evoked by the protest of Arius at what he conceived to be the erroneous teaching propounded by the official leadership of his church (he was one of Alexander’s presbyters at Alexandria). The theology of Arius might appear superficially to reflect the Origenist tradition as exemplified by Eusebius of Caesarea, and in fact to be based upon a repetition in a more extreme form of the pluralistic and subordinationist Trinitarian doctrine characteristic of Dionysius of Alex¬ andria in his less guarded utterances. This, however, would be misleading. His ideas follow from certain important presuppositions which were different from those of Origen and his followers, and Arius himself was to a considerable extent an original thinker. It is, in fact, notoriously difficult to try to trace a pedigree for the characteristic tenets of Arianism. In his own letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia, his most important ally among contem¬ porary bishops,5 Arius claimed to be Eusebius’ ‘co-Lucianist’, which appears to mean that both were disciples of Lucian of Antioch, a renowned scholar 1 2 3 4 6

d.e. 3.4; 4.12. ib. 10.8.74. ib. 10.1; cf. 4.12 and the exposition of Ps. 22 at ep. Alex. 26; ep. encycl. 13; ep. Alex. 52, 45, 15, Epiphanius haer. 69.6.

10.8. 38.

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and a martyr in the last persecution in 312. Alexander traces the error of Arius back through Lucian to Paul of Samosata and thence to Artemon and the Ebionites;1 but this would link Arius with the so-called dynamicmonarchian tradition or unitarianism, and although Arius is often mis¬ understood as having simply denied the deity of Christ he was far from asserting, in the ordinary modern fashion, that Jesus was a mere man (and therefore not God). On the contrary, Arius maintained that Jesus was God, and not fully man; but that he was created God. There is no reason to doubt that Arius and Eusebius were connected with Lucian; but whether Lucian stood in any sort of succession to Paul of Samosata is much more doubtful. It may be that Alexander was simply picking on the damaging fact that the theology of Arius placed the gulf which divides God from his creatures between the Father and the Son, whereas what was now traditional ortho¬ doxy placed it between the Holy Spirit and the highest of created beings, and that, in order to find a convenient stick of propaganda with which to beat Arius, Alexander was suggesting that this was where Paul’s theology had also placed that crucial gulf: in this case between the monadic God (including his immanent and anhypostatic Word) and his creatures (of whom the man Jesus was one). If so, the connection of Arius with that Unitarian tradition consists simply in the fact that in one particular respect they could be said to arrive at similar results by opposite routes. Arius rejected the Origenistic theory of one and the same divine essence broadening down, as it were, so as to subsist at different, hierarchically graded levels. Consequently he repudiated the idea that the Logos occupies an intermediate position, in the sense that the Logos is a second divine principle perfectly reflecting the transcendent Father and transmitting to the world of creatures the image by which alone the Father can be known and described. In their dislike of a second divine principle intermediate in status and subordinate in function the Arians and the theology of Athana¬ sius and Nicene orthodoxy have more in common than they have with Origen. In their opposite ways both parties are concerned to express in the sharpest possible terms the fundamental distinction between the absolute God and all that is not absolute God. Nicaea took the Logos out of any conceivable intermediate position by bringing the belief that he is of the same essence as the ingenerate Father into the Creed and giving it central theological importance: what the Father is, that the Son is, and no less. The Logos is set firmly on the side of absolute deity. Arius, on the other hand, also setting out to affirm the same total dichotomy between the ultimate source of all things and everything which is derived from it, did so in the opposite way by assigning the Logos to the creatures’ side of the gulf which separates them from absolute deity. Like all else that is not the one ultimate source, the Logos is created out of nothing; for in Arius’ system there is no descending scale of hierarchically graded divine being; all that is not the absolute monad belongs to the scale of creaturely being. Thus according to the Nicene theology there is no possibility of a divine principle which is ‘second’ in any but a numerical sense; in essence it must be one with the first principle. According to Arius, on the other hand, there cannot 1

ep. Alex.

35.

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95

be a second principle which is divine in any but a nominal or honorific sense. The divine essence is simple and indivisible; it cannot be shared, for this would imply that the substance of deity suffers division. Hence the partici¬ pation of the Son in the Father is not a participation in his essence but a participation in grace. The Son receives from the Father and transmits or reflects what he receives, but what he receives is not substance; rather he receives and reflects in somewhat the kind of way in which an icon might be said to participate in, imitate and transmit the virtue of its original. The Father communicates his attributes to the Son by an act of grace, and it is by virtue of this that it is possible to predicate divine attributes of the Son. At the root of much of this thinking there lies Arius’ conviction that there can be no more than one unoriginated and self-existent principle. The quality of being agennetos, which strictly means ‘unbegotten’ but was used by Arius synonymously with agenetos (unoriginated), belongs to the Father alone. The Son must therefore belong to the created order, as the highest and most excellent of all creatures but different in essence from God, Arius makes many of his points clear in his letter, appealing for support, to Eusebius of Nicomedia.1 The Father and the Son do not co-exist from eternity as two unoriginate principles, and the Father is, contrary to the teaching of Alexander, both conceptually and temporally anterior to the Son. The Son is not unoriginate (for that would imply two gods), nor a part of the unoriginate deity; he came into existence by a deliberate act of the Father’s will before time and ages, but not by an eternal act of generation: he was not before he was begotten, a term which for Arius is not to be differentiated from ‘created’.2 Arius complains that his party is being persecuted at Alexandria because they assert that the Son has a beginning whereas God is without beginning, and for their belief that, since he is not a part of God by a division of the divine substance, he is created, like all other creatures, out of nothing. A careful statement of their beliefs was sent by Arius and his supporters to Alexander, 3 claiming that theirs was the traditional faith. It acknowl¬ edges one God, alone ingenerate, alone eternal, alone without beginning, alone true, immortal, wise, good, powerful, who is unchangeable and im¬ mutable, who begat the only-begotten Son before all time, through whom he made the ages and the universe, begetting not in appearance but in reality, and causing him to subsist by his own will as a perfect, unchange¬ able and immutable creature of God, ‘but not as one of the creatures’; an offspring, ‘but not as one of those things that are begotten’: not a projection, as the Valentinians would teach, nor a consubstantial part of the Father as the Manichaeans would affirm, nor one who is both Son and Father as Sabellius asserted; nor was he who was prior (i.e. the Father) afterwards begotten or made subsequently to become Son; but he was created by God’s will before times and ages, receiving his being from the Father. In giving him the inheritance of all things the Father did not deprive himself of what haer. 69.6. Ar. 1.5, 9. syn. 16.

1 Epiph.

2 cf. Ath. 3 Ath.

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he possesses ingenerately in himself, for he is the source of all things. Thus there are three hypostases. God as the cause of all things is solely without beginning. The Son, begotten timelessly and created and established before the ages, was not before he was begotten. For he is not eternal or co-eternal or co-unoriginate with the Father. Nor does he co-exist with the Father as a correlative term, as some affirm, thereby introducing two ingenerate principles. If the divine substance were divided, the Father would be divisible and mutable, and would, as the incorporeal God, suffer what pertains to a corporeal being. The argument from correlative terms which Arius here rejects is the assertion that in the case of God ‘Father’ implies ‘Son’ and since he is eternally Father there must be an eternal Son: God’s relations being necessary and permanent and not accidental and temporary. This was rejected by the Arians on the ground that, according to the same argument, since God is Creator there must eternally be creatures and it would be as impossible to say of them as of the Son, ‘They were not before they were begotten (or created)’.1 The Arians had a point here, and Athanasius in reply had to lay great stress on the difference between ‘generation’ and ‘creation’ (as in the Nicene clause: ‘begotten not made’) and on the difference between the Father-Son relationship and the external and contingent relationship of creator-creature. The Arians, however, with their insistence that the generation of the Son was by an act of will, were extremely averse to any idea which might suggest that the Son, or the universe, was necessary to God. Arius’ Thalia, a compendium of his theology, largely in verse, meant for popular consumption, dwells on the point that God was originally alone, and became Father only when the Logos had been created from nothing. The implication which Arius drew was that the Father had his own Wisdom by which the Son was made, and that the Son is Logos and Wisdom by grace only.2 Nor is the Son authentically God; he only participates in deity by grace.3 Hence the Son does not comprehend God in his infinity, but only in so far as divine grace has granted him a revelation.4 The conclusion is that the Son is ‘alien and dissimilar in all respects to the Father’s substance and individual being’.5 A consequence of this theory is that the Son, unlike the Father, is mutable, though made morally perfect by grace given to him by the Father in accordance with his foreknowledge of the excellent way in which the Son would exercise his free will.6 This theory enabled Arius to account for the episodes such as the Temptations which always presented grave difficulty for theologies which tried to combine a full doctrine of Christ’s deity with a Christology that took little or no account of a human soul and will in Christ. For Arius held a Christology of this type, as is clear from Athanasius’ arguments with the Arians over the passages in the Gospels implying 1 Ath. 2 3

ib. ib.

9

1.29.

1.6.

ep. A eg. et. Lib. Ar. 1.6. ib. 1.5.

4 Ath. 6

Ar.

1.5. 12

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Christ’s ignorance or weakness;1 and this is borne out by Eustathius of Antioch’s telling criticism of Arian Christology: that it attributes mutability to the deity (‘spirit’) of Christ and thereby supports their theory that this deity could not be begotten from a nature that is immutable.2 At a later stage in the Arian controversy the creed of Eudoxius of Constantinople (360) makes the point clearly: . . incarnate, not made man; for he did not assume a human soul, but became flesh in order that through flesh as through a veil he might be made known to us as God; not two natures, since he was not a complete man but instead of a soul God in flesh; the whole one nature by composition’.3 The controversy which these opinions evoked was the main business which Constantine required the ‘First Ecumenical Council’ (though in fact it was almost entirely an Eastern Council) to settle. The formula of Nicaea was an uncompromising rejection of Arianism. Its anathemas condemned the Arian tenets: ‘There was when he was not’, ‘He was not before he was begotten’, ‘He was created out of nothing’, ‘He is of a different hypostasis or substance’ (these terms being here treated as synonyms), ‘He is created, mutable and changeable’. The Creed itself asserts that the Son is of the substance of the Father, begotten not made, homoousios with the Father. Thus the Council effectively ruled out Arius’ solution to the problem of the relation of the Son to the Father, and declared that the Son was God, as being in essence what the Father is. This was in line with Western theology, and the insertion of the homoousion into the creed, apparently on the insistence of the emperor himself, may have suggested to some Eastern theologians, such as Eustathius and Marcellus of Ancyra, the possibility that it could lend itself to a highly monistic interpretation; but it was accepted at the time by the large majority of conservative Origenists in the East as a means of defeating Arius, and at that time few wanted to be Arian. For this reason Eusebius of Caesarea subscribed to the formula of Nicaea, and in this he was typical of much Eastern opinion, even though he had doubts, which, as he informed his church in a letter after the council, he believed had been satisfactorily met, about the possible implications of the homoousion: doubts, that is, concerning the possibility of the term being misunderstood, as Arius had interpreted it, to mean that the divine sub¬ stance had been divided and God subjected to mutation.4 Yet, having for the time being ruled out Arianism, the Council had in fact only rung up the curtain on a long debate between those who had accepted the negative implications of Nicaea while remaining suspicious lest its positive teaching might lead to the Origenists’ bogey of Sabellianism, and those who were prepared to accept this creed and make the interpretation of its assertions the basis of their Trinitarian thinking. Nicaea was thus not the end but the beginning of the fourth-century controversy.

1

ib.

%

-

P

3.26.

15.

Bibliothek der Symbole, p. 261. ep. Caes. 5ft. See below, p. 98E

3 Hahn, 4 Eus.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY AFTER THE COUNCIL OF NICAEA The purpose of the formula of Nicaea was mainly negative. The Council was concerned to refute the teaching of Arius and to make unequivocally clear its denial of the assertion that the Son is different in essence from the Father. The terms in which it expressed this denial were necessarily those in which the Arian party had framed its assertions. Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia, the most important and influential of the supporters of Arius, had declared in a letter which was read at Nicaea that if uncreatedness is predicated of the Son this is tantamount to saying that he is homoousios with the Father -- a proposition which Eusebius held to be self-evidently absurd. It was because the Arians had taken the initiative in throwing the homoousion into the ring that their opponents were forced to take up the challenge and. insert it into the creed. The intention was not that the term should become a battle-cry for the orthodox, but that the inclusion of it should put teeth into the creed of Nicaea as an anti-Arian document, making it impossible for any who actually held Arius’ doctrine to accept it. As Ambrose, who recounts the facts about Eusebius’ letter puts it, the Council cut off the head of the Arians’ heresy with the sword which the Arians themselves had been the first to draw.1 What precise positive meaning might be assigned to the term to which the Council gave such central importance was not defined. Apart from its negative significance as a denial of Arianism it was a dangerous word. It could be attacked, as Ambrose goes on to explain, as being unscriptural and as implying a Sabellian identity of Father and Son as a Godhead without personal distinctions.2 Athanasius and other defenders of Nicaea had to show that though the word itself is not found in Scripture, its insertion into the creed was designed to safeguard the truths implicit in the biblical revelation; Ambrose also points out, less satisfactorily, that ousia itself can be considered a scriptural word since other compounds of it, though admittedly not homoousios, are to be found in the Bible. Ambrose, like Athanasius and others, replies to the charge of Sabellianism that the homoousion actually implies distinction: one thing can be said to be consubstantial only with another, not with itself.3 Eusebius of Caesarea thought it necessary to write a letter to his diocese explaining why he had endorsed the creed which included so suspicious a term, and in it he shows that his 1 Ambrose 2

ib.

fid.

126-7.

3.15.125.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

99

main fear was lest it should be given a materialistic interpretation and be understood to imply that the divine essence is not absolutely simple but capable of division. So he reassures his people that ‘ “consubstantial” signifies that the Son is of the Father’, but not as being ‘part of the Father’s nature’ or ‘part of his substance’; it does not imply ‘division of substance nor abscission nor any change or diminution in the power of the Father’.1 Eusebius himself gave a minimizing interpretation to the Nicene creed's explanation of ‘only-begotten’, ‘that is, from the substance of the Father’. He took it to mean only that the Son does not resemble in any respect the creatures which he has made, but that to the Father who begat him he is in all points perfectly similar.2 More disingenuously, Eusebius defended the Council’s condemnation of the assertion that ‘before he was begotten he had no existence’ on the ground that everyone agrees that he was Son of God before he was horn according to the flesh (a proposition from which Arius himself would not have dissented), and his acceptance of the creed’s implicit teaching of the eternity of the son on the ground that (as he claims Constantine explained it) the Son was potentially in the Father, without being begotten, before he was begotten in actuality.3 ‘In all points perfectly similar’, ‘like in all respects’, are phrases which represent the way in which not only Eusebius but the majority of thinkers in the Origenistic East were either to interpret the Nicene homoousion, or else to replace it with other formulations, for a long time after 325. At the time all but a tiny Arian minority accepted the homoousion in order to rule out the Arian assertions, and they understood it to mean that the Son is not different in essence or nature from the Father but is of the same essence or nature (i.e. homogeneous) with him. It is likely that some of them would go further and recognize that when it is applied to the persons of the Godhead ‘homogeneity’ must involve actual identity of substance: mono¬ theism requires no less. This was probably the case with Constantine’s adviser Ossius, bishop of Cordova, and the few other representatives of the West at Nicaea; Latin theology had spoken of ‘one substance’ since Tertullian’s time. It was certainly true of those Eastern leaders whose idea of God was monistic, as opposed to the pluralism of the Origenist tradition, and who therefore tended to think in terms of an impersonal Logos, divine Reason immanent in God from eternity and projected as divine Word for the purpose of the ‘economy’ (and thus identical in essence with the Father), rather than of a Son personally subsisting. These conclusions, however, as the letter of Eusebius to Caesarea plainly shows, were not drawn by the Council of Nicaea itself. It had asserted that the Son is God in the full sense: the word ‘God’ means the same when Christians say that the Son is God as it does when they say that the Father is God. There is no difference in essence, since the Son is ‘true God of true God’. The Council had not proceeded to attempt any explanation of the divine unity: to indicate how its assertion of ‘consubstantiality’ may be compatible with belief (a) that there is one God only and not two equal and homogeneous Gods, and (b) 1 Eusebius 2

ib.

ep. Caes.

(Socrates

h.e.

1.8; Theodoret

h.e.

1.12).

V

A History of Christian Doctrine

ioo

that the Father and the Son who are of one essence and not distinct in essence are nevertheless distinct as Father and Son and not identical in a Sabellian sense. Thus, far from settling the problem of Unity and Trinity, the Council of Nicaea raised it in a sharper form; and behind the Trinitarian question there lay the problem of Christology: what does it mean for Christians to say that Jesus Christ is God when the word ‘God’ carries the full weight of meaning involved in the Nicene homoousion? The problem was complicated, and the controversy exacerbated, by the fact that among those who understood the formula to imply identity of substance were monistic theologians who stood, in some respects at least, close to the tradition of Paul of Samosata and who represented the type of thinking which, since the controversy between the Dionysii and the Council of Antioch of 268, had been most abhorrent to the ‘central’ majority of orthodox Eastern Christians for whom a clear distinction of persons and the assertion of three hypostases was all-important. Among these theolo¬ gians were Eustathius, bishop of Antioch, and Marcellus, bishop of Ancyra. The former was the first episcopal victim of what was in fact not so much a reaction against the Nicene definition as a movement by the majority of those who had subscribed to it on the understanding that it should be interpreted in a loose anti-Arian sense such as was given to it by Eusebius of Caesarea. He was deposed by a council at Antioch in 331 on the doctrinal ground of Sabellianism. Socrates, it is true, took this incident as an illus¬ tration in his Ecclesiastical History of the misunderstandings and confusions which arose over the homoousion: a fight in the dark in which, while objectors to the term accused its supporters of being Sabellian subverters of the hypostatic existence of the Son and advocates of it accused its opponents of being polytheists, all were really agreed that the Son is a distinct hypostasis and that there is one God in a Trinity of persons.1 Nevertheless, it seems that Eustathius was vulnerable to the Eusebian attack and not simply a victim of misunderstanding. He was in a sense an old-fashioned theologian, sometimes echoing the ideas of his second-century countryman, Theophilus. The Son, who is Word, Wisdom, and Spirit (by which is probably meant ‘divine being’) is God’s power put forth, or ‘begotten’, as his externally directed activity; Eustathius seems not to regard this Son as a distinct hypostasis subsisting personally from eternity.2 This ‘anhypostatic’ con¬ ception of the Logos enabled Eustathius to point out the deficiencies of Arianism from a new angle. Recognizing that the Arian assertion of the possibility and mutability of the Logos was bound up with their denial of a human soul in Christ,3 he maintained the full reality of the ‘man’ assumed by, anointed with, borne by, or indwelt by, the Logos or Spirit of God.4 The human soul, rather than a personal Logos who had ‘come down from heaven’ is the centre of the personality of Christ, and this soul is also the meetingpoint of the human and the divine, living with the Word and God,5 and 1

h.e.

2 cf.

1.23.

hom. in Prov. 8:22] (Spanneut, Recherches sur les Ecrits d'Eustathe d’Antioche fr. in Pss. (ib. p. 106).

1948, pp. 102, 104);

fr. 15. * frr. 9,

3

5 A- 17.

See above, p. 97. 19, 24, 41-45, 47-

Lille.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

ioi

inseparably united with the indwelling divine Spirit. By reverting to this older type of Christology Eustathius was able to assert both the unity of God and the full humanity of Christ more uninhibitedly than his Origenist contemporaries, to cut the roots of Arianism, and to anticipate the Antio¬ chene Christology of a century later, though at the cost, as it would seem to Alexandrian theologians, of positing a ‘moral’ or ‘psychological’ rather than ‘hypostatic’ union between God and man in Christ. Although he was a primary target for the attack mounted against those who seemed to be undermining the traditional Eastern belief in three hypostases, Eustathius was always regarded by those who upheld the positive implications of Nicaea as a hero. Athanasius mentions him as a ‘confessor and orthodox man’, a victim of pro-Arian plotting.1 A more embarrassing adherent of the same ‘Nicene’ party was Marcellus, bishop of Ancyra, who was deposed like Eustathius on the ground of Sabellian monarchianism but somewhat rashly included with Athanasius and Asclepas, bishop of Gaza, in the vindication of deposed Eastern bishops (Eustathius having probably died before this) announced in 343 by the Western Council of Sardica.2 Marcellus, whose teaching is preserved mainly in the citations contained in two works directed against him by Eusebius of Caesarea, reacted most vigorously against the denial of the divine unity which he found in the Arian theologians such as Eusebius of Nicomedia, Narcissus of Neronias and Asterius the Sophist, especially the last-named against whom his championship of the homoousion was chiefly directed, and which he also saw in the pluralistic Trinitarian doctrine of Eusebius of Caesarea. The beliefs that the Father is ‘one’ and the Logos ‘another’, that the unity between Father and Son is a union of wills, that the Logos can be termed ‘second God’, that he is a creature, and that it is proper to speak of two, or three, ousiai,3 were countered by Marcellus with a monistic theology which confirmed the worst fears of those who suspected Sabellianism in the Nicene formula but which in fact, like that of Eustathius, was akin, not so much to Sabellianism as to second-century orthodoxy of the type repre¬ sented by Theophilus of Antioch. Marcellus reverted, in fact, to the idea of deity as pure monad (a concept which he held to be supported by such texts as ‘I am the first and the last and beside me there is no God’), as opposed to the idea of a distinction of hypostases which for him amounted to ditheism.4 In this one God, the Father, the Logos subsisted as immanent reason until, when the purpose of God to create the world required it, the Logos came forth as an active operation of God by which creation was carried out.5 The Father and the Logos are not two ousiai, two entities, or two powers, for the Logos is the power and wisdom of God, inseparable from him and one and the same with him.6 The ‘coming forth’ of the Logos is not a ‘generation of the Son’ but an extension or broadening out, of the indivisible monad into triad, for the 1 fug. 3. 2 Theodoret 3 4 5 6

h.e. 2.8. Marcellus fr. 3 ap. Eus. Marcell. 1.4; ft. 63, fr. 33, ft. 71, id. fr. 67 ap. Eus. eccl. theol. 2.19. id. fr. 54 ap. eund. 3.3. id. frr. 72, 63, ap. Eus. Marcell. 1.4; fr. 64 ap. eund. 2.2.

ap. eund.

102

A History of Christian Doctrine

‘procession’ of the Logos is parallel to the ‘procession’ of the Holy Spirit (Marcellus uses the same term in each case). Marcellus claims, indeed, that his ‘dynamic’ concept of both Logos and Spirit, taken with his insistence on the absolute unity of the divine monad, enables him to make sense of the fact that St. John ascribes the procession of the Spirit to the Father as its source and yet at the same time says that the Spirit will ‘take of mine', i.e. of what pertains to the Logos. These statements, he maintains, become contradictory if Son and Spirit are conceived of as distinct hypostases.1 For the economy of salvation the Logos has indwelt the man whom he assumed, indwelling as a power rather than as a person, enabling the assumed man, who is fallen man, to be raised to God’s right hand and reign as king. This kingdom is temporary, for it will cease when the economy is completed in the subjugation of every enemy to his authority: an idea for which Marcellus naturally finds evidence in I Cor. 15:24-28. When that consummation has been achieved there will be no need for the economy, in which the Logos can be said to have assumed the form of a servant, to continue; the Logos reigns eternally because God reigns and his Logos is immanent in him, and when the economy of salvation has been wound up the Logos will no longer be projected externally but will, as it were, be withdrawn once again into the inner being of the monad.2 The idea that Christ’s kingdom is not eternal was naturally fastened upon by Marcellus’ opponents; but it was perfectly possible for the Council of Sardica to reply that he did not affirm, as they represented, that the origin of the divine Logos was dated from Mary’s conception or that his kingdom would have no end; on the contrary, he wrote that his kingdom (i.e. in the sense of the reign of God’s immanent Reason) had had no beginning and would have no end.3 More important in his theology is his firm adherence to the notion of ‘Logos’ as the expression or utterance of the mind of God. It is analogous to the human word which cannot be separated as a distinct hypostasis, or even power, from the person who utters it, but is distinguishable only as an activity of that person.4 This makes it possible for Marcellus to follow traditional exegesis in taking it to be the Logos who addressed Moses in the burning bush. The Logos spoke to him, but only as the organ, as it were, of the Father: the Father said ‘I am' through his Logos,5 as it might be through the agency of a tongue. Further, the fact that he does distinguish the Logos as the divine revelatory activity enables him to differentiate his theology from that of Sabellius who, according to him, simply denied that ‘Logos’ refers to anything except the Father and asserted that the content of the words ‘Logos’ and ‘Father’ is absolutely identical.6 Important, too, is his consequent interpretation of the divinity of Christ in dynamic terms; the hypostasis or person of Christ is the man whom the Logos or Power of God has assumed and indwells and who is thereby Son of God. The notion of an end to the Incarnation (or rather, the 1 2 3 4 5

6

fr. fr.

eccl. theol. 3.4. 104 ap Marcell. 2.4; fr. 108 ap. eccl. theol. Thdt. h.e. 2.8. Marcell. fr. 55 ap. Eus. Marcell. 2.2. id. fr. 56 ap. eund. fr. 38 ap. eccl. theol. 1.15. 60 ap.

3.10.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

103

‘economy’ of the assumption of the man by the Logos), though it raises its own great difficulties, was at least a bold attempt to deal with the Trinitarian and Christological problems at the point where they seem, even if only superficially, to be most acute: namely, in respect of the post-Ascension state of the incarnate Son of God. It was these last aspects of his teaching which made Marcellus an obvious target for attack by the opponents of the homoousion, especially in the light of the further development of his Christology in an adoptionist sense by Photinus, bishop of Sirmium. Having made a profession of faith in a form which a comparison with the baptismal creed in Hippolytus’ Apostolic Tradition and with the evidence in Rufinus’ Exposition of the Apostolic Creed shows to have been the creed of the Roman church itself,1 he was accepted by a local synod under Julius, bishop of Rome, in or about 340 and never explicitly disowned by the Western leaders. Eastern councils, however, formally anathematized him, linking his name with those of Sabellius and Paul of Samosata (in the third creed of Antioch of 341) and with Photinus as well as Paul of Samosata (in the fourth creed of Antioch, 341, and the Creed of Antioch of 345).2 The first of these creeds also insists on the hypo¬ static existence of the Logos, the second and third on the eternity of Christ’s reign and heavenly session, and the third on the doctrine that the Son exists from before the ages as the companion addressed by God in the words ‘Let us make man . . .’ and is not to be thought of as the immanent Logos which became externalized (Logos endiathetos and prophorikos). The series of creeds produced by these councils, by the council at Philippopolis in 343 to which the Eastern bishops withdrew after refusing to associate with the Western supporters of Athanasius and Marcellus at Sardica, and by the first council of Sirmium in 351, represent, on the whole, an attempt to steer a middle course. They avoid the characteristic state¬ ments of the Nicene formula, speak of the Son as the exact image of the Father’s deity, and of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as being three in hypostasis but one in harmony,3 and anathematize the distinctively Arian formulae4 concerning the creation of the Logos out of nothing and there having been (a time) when he was not. At the same time they condemn the tenets of Marcellus such as the reduction of the idea of the ‘Son’ to that of a temporary extension of the divine substance5 and the belief that the son of Mary was only a man;6 they also repeatedly assert the vital importance of the belief that the Son’s generation is by the will of the Father.7 Arianism and Sabellianism are thus ruled out, without any desire to endorse the specifically Nicene doctrine. Nor was the key word homoousios employed in the statement of faith contained in the encyclical letter of the Western } Marcell. ap. Epiphanium haer. 72 (Hahn, Bibliothek der Symbole, p. 22). 2 Ath. syn. 24 (Hahn, p. 186); ib. 25 (p. 187); ib. 26 (p. 194). 8 Second (‘Lucianic’) Creed of Antioch (341) ap. Athn. syn. 23 (Hahn, pp. 185-6). 4 ib.; also Fourth Creed of Antioch (341), Creed of Philippopolis ap. Hilarium syn. 34 (Hahn, p. 191), Creed of Antioch (345), Creed of Sirmium (351) ap. Ath. syn. 27 (Hahn, p. 197). 5 Creed of Sirmium (351) anathemas 6 & 7. 6 ib. anathema 9. 7 Creed of Philippopolis, Antioch (345) and Sirmium (351), anathema 25.

104

A History of Christian Doctrine

council of Sardica which approved the teaching of Athanasius. This formula treats ‘hypostasis’ as synonymous with ‘substance’ (ousia) and affirms one hypostasis or substance of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The unity of Father and Son is not like the sonship towards God enjoyed by the regenerate, for it is a one-ness of hypostasis. The Father is greater than the Son, not because of any difference of hypostasis but simply because the word ‘Father’ is greater than the word ‘Son’. The Son is eternal, without beginning or end.1 This statement thus goes further than Nicaea in a positive affirmation of the divine unity and in rejecting the subordinationism characteristic of the Origenist tradition. The theological working out of the ‘Nicene’ theology represented by the Sardican statement was the great achievement of Athanasius. His thought is centred upon a few major theological principles. One of these is a clear idea of divine creativity. The Arian view, that creation is a two-stage process in which the Son is first created as an intermediary being by whom all other creatures will subsequently be made, is refuted by Athanasius on the ground that no such intermediary is necessary. God himself can and does create by his mere fiat. Were it necessary that a mediator should be interposed between God and the creation of the world, it would also seem that another mediator would be required for the creation of the first mediator, and so on infinitely. On the other hand, if, as Scripture asserts, God continues himself to create along with, and by the agency of, his Word, it is absurd to suppose that a created intermediary was necessary in the first place. The doctrine of creation thus offers no support for any attempt to relegate the Son to a status inferior to that of deity in the fullest sense.2 While holding that the relation between God and the created universe offers no reason for assigning the Logos to the created sphere, Athanasius denies the Origenistic principle that deity subsists at different levels. The essence of God, which is one and the same in the Father and the Son, is not communicated or extended to any lower order of being. It is true that Athanasius describes the divine essence as ‘productive’ or ‘fruitful’,3 but this does not mean that it is extensible beyond the Logos; it means that God is essentially creative, and the argument of Athanasius is that since God creates through the Logos, and since without the Logos he would not possess creative energy, God’s creativity implies the essential unity of the Father and the Logos/Son. Thus Athanasius allows no place for an hierarchical subordination within the divine being; and in this respect his aim is similar to that of Arius, though whereas Arius avoided any ‘broadening down’ of deity by placing the Son among the creatures Athanasius follows the opposite course of asserting that the Son and the Father are one and the same substance. There is no difference of ousia. The deity of Father and Son is actually identical; ‘the deity of the Father is that of the Son’,4 the being of the Father is proper to the Son, and he is of the same nature as the 1 2 3 4

Theodoret h.e. 2.8; Hahn, pp. i88ff. Ath. Ar. 2.24-29. ib. 2.2. ib. 1.61.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

105

Father, but of another essence and another kind from all creatures.1 The nature of Father and Son is one; the Son as offspring, is different from the Father: as God he is the same. Father and Son are one in the identity of the one deity; hence whatever is predicated of God is predicated inter¬ changeably of the Father and the Son. The old simile of the sun and its ray is adduced as an illustration: there are not two lights, but the one light of the sun which shines in the ray.2 The idea of the eternal generation of the Logos is, of course, entirely dissociated from its Origenistic framework of thought. It no longer has any connexion with a relationship subsisting between God and his creation; on the contrary, it serves to emphasize the absolute uniqueness of the relation of Son to Father. It is also used in refutation of an Arian argument that if the Son is co-eternal with the Father he should be termed brother rather than son, and to show, too, that the idea of 'generation’ does not imply either a temporal priority of the Father or any kind of deficiency in the Father which had to be made good. ‘Generation’ must not be interpreted anthropomorphically.3 The Arians attempted, according to Athanasius, to disguise their teaching that the Logos is a creature by wrapping it up in the time-honoured assertion that he is begotten by an act of the Father’s will. This traditional doctrine had been originally intended to safeguard the hypostatic distinc¬ tion of Father and Son against Gnostic ideas of emanation and monarchian notions of numerical unity. It had now become incompatible with Athana¬ sius' doctrine of the total otherness of the Logos from all created being and the absolute identity of substance of Father and Son. He accordingly cleared up a frustrating dilemma by refusing to accept the alternatives: voluntary begetting or involuntary (i.e. under constraint or contrary to the divine will). The Son is begotten, not by the Father’s deliberate intention but by reason of his nature. God cannot not beget the Son, just as he cannot not be good. In neither case is God subject to necessity, other than the necessity of his own nature, nor can his actions be termed involuntary.4 * Athanasius also clarified the long-standing obscurity about the usage of the terms agenetos and agennetos, which should strictly speaking denote ‘un¬ originated’ and ‘unbegotten’ respectively, but which had constantly been confused. It is an indication of the extent of this confusion that in the passage where Athanasius deals most explicitly with this question the manuscripts vary greatly in their spelling of these key words. The Arians were asking whether there is one ageneton principle or two. Athanasius replies that if they really mean ‘unoriginated’ then the Son must be so described; if they mean ‘unbegotten’ then the Father alone can be so called. But the Son’s being begotten (being gennetos or a gennema) does not make him genetos in the sense of being originated or created; on the contrary, if he were this he could not be the perfect image of the unoriginate Father; he would, rather, belong to, and reflect, the order of created being.6 The 1 ib. 1.58. 2 ib. 3.4. 3 ib. 1.14; cf. deer. 20.

4 Ar. 3.59-678 ib. 1.3.

io6

A History of Christian Doctrine

term agenetos should not, according to Athanasius, be used in discourse about the relation between the Father and the Son, for the Son is the eternal Logos of, and subsisting with, the unoriginate Father, but it is appropriate only with reference to the relation between God and creatures.1 Besides his doctrine of creation which caused him to react so vigorously against any notion of an intermediate being, at once created and creative, between God and the world, Athanasius’ soteriology was a powerful motive in the working out of his Trinitarian theology. The Saviour must be none other than God. He could not be an intermediary. Not only was God the creator of man in the beginning; it was as a participant in the divine Logos, enabled by this participation to contemplate God, that man was enabled to rise above his natural condition of mortality and enjoy undying blessed¬ ness as one who bore the stamp of the divine image. The Fall meant man’s loss of blessedness; transgression led on to a state of steadily increasing corruption, the natural end of which would be man’s total dissolution. Only the Creator could re-create fallen man; redemption involved the restoration of the divine image in man, for which, as for an almost obliterated portrait, the presence of the original ‘sitter’ was required; it involved the return of corrupt human nature to the state of incorruptibility; and, since God had decreed total death as the penalty for transgression, it necessitated the preservation of God’s self-consistency (which forbade the simple revocation of the sentence by an act of forgiveness) without the frustration of his creative purpose which would be brought about by the annihilation of the creature to whom he had granted participation in his own Logos.2 Only he who is the Father’s Logos, transcending the whole creation, ‘was capable of re-creating all things, suffering for all men, and acting as advocate for all men with the Father’.3 Athanasius also understands salvation in terms of divinization, and he holds that, since divinization means participation in God, only one who is essentially God can bestow it. It may be questioned whether this argument was cogent, since the ‘divinization’ of man did not mean for Athanasius that man was to become one with God in the sense in which he believed that the Son was one with the Father. Deification is virtually identified with adoption into sonship;4 we are made sons by adoption and grace, participating in the Spirit that is the earnest of deifica¬ tion. ‘We are sons, but not as the Son, and gods, but not as he is God.’6 It may seem that there is no reason why the participation in God, through grace, of a created being should not be effected by an Arian Logos who is himself a created being participating in deity by grace. Athanasius, how¬ ever, is sure that one who is himself deified cannot deify; no one can make others participate in what he himself possesses only by participation and not in his own right, for it is not his to bestow but it belongs to another, and he enjoys possession of it only by grace which is sufficient for himself alone.6 1 2 8 4 6 •

deer. 28-32. inc. 4-16. ib. 7. Ar. 1.39. ib. 3.20; inc. et c. Ar. 9. syn. 51

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

107

Similar considerations played a great part in Athanasius’ thought about the being of the Holy Spirit. It is in the middle of the fourth century that the question of the relation of the Spirit to the Father and the Son becomes a theological issue. The Nicene formula had been content with a third article in the form, ‘And in the Holy Spirit’, without explanation. The Catechetical Lectures of Cyril of Jerusalem in or about 348 affirm the divinity of the Spirit in contrast with the Arian teaching that the Spirit is the highest of the creatures that have, as the Origenist tradition understood Jn. 1:3 to state, been brought into being through the Logos.1 Athanasius, however, was compelled to attempt a more thorough treatment of this subject, for not only did the creaturely status of the Spirit follow from the Arian doctrine of the Logos, but belief in it was also propagated by some who did not profess Arianism in respect of the Son. Athanasius addressed a series of letters on the subject to Serapion, bishop of Thmuis, who was concerned about the Egyptian Christians known to Athanasius as ‘Tropici’, this name probably referring to the tropoi or ‘figures’ by which they read their doctrine out of certain biblical texts, such as Am. 4:13 (misunderstood as alluding to the creation, not of ‘wind’ but of ‘Spirit’), which they inter¬ preted as evidence that the Spirit is among the created angels of God.2 Athanasius attacks this view, using as a primary argument the Spirit’s work as life-giver and sanctifier: the Spirit makes men participate in God, but only one who is God, and not one who is himself a participant by grace, can effect such participation; creatures are recipients of life and sanctifica¬ tion: the Spirit is the giver of them; therefore the Spirit is not a creature; the Spirit deifies, and therefore cannot be a recipient of deification like a creature.3 To support this argument Athanasius asserts that Scripture shows that the Spirit is Spirit of God and Spirit of the Son; the Son is wisdom and truth, the Spirit is the Spirit of wisdom and truth.4 The Spirit’s operation is inseparable from that of the Father and the Son, and the relationship between Father and Son must subsist also between the Son, and so also the Father, and the Spirit.5 A somewhat less convincing argu¬ ment takes belief in the Trinity as a datum; if the Trinity is eternal and unchanging, as all would agree, neither the Son nor the Spirit can have been created.6 The Spirit is therefore not a creature, but one with Father and Son in the deity of the Trinity, and homoousios with God.7 The developed Trinitarian doctrine which Athanasius thus constructed on the foundation of the anti-Arian formula of Nicaea involved him in acute Christological difficulty. He was committed to the belief that the Son's deity is the Father’s, that the ‘form of God’ (Phil. 2:6) means nothing less than that the being of the Son is the fulness of the Father’s deity, and that the Son is ‘complete God’.8 Eustathius and Marcellus could affirm all this 1 2 3 4 5 8 7 8

Catech. 8.5; 4.16; 16.8, 3, 23; 6.6. Ath. Serap. 1.21; 1.3, 10, 11. ib. 1.22-24. ib. 1-26. ib. 3.1-5. ib. 3-7ib. 1.21, 27. Ar. 3.6.

io8

A History of Christian Doctrine

and yet, by interpreting ‘incarnation’ in terms of an indwelling of the fullness of God within the human personality of the ‘assumed man’, safe¬ guard the humanity of Christ against docetism. Athanasius, however, was typically Alexandrian in his Christology; there is, certainly, an indwelling of the Logos, but it is an indwelling in a fleshly body;1 the idea that the Logos entered into a holy man (‘as into one of the prophets’, he adds) means, for him, a division of the one Person into a human Christ, on the one hand, and a divine Logos on the other; it is as shocking as the opposite notion that the fleshly body is homoousios with the deity of the Logos and that it was the deity, homoousios with the Father, and not rather the created flesh, which underwent the human experience and suffered.2 Any idea that the Logos entered into ‘a man from Mary’ is ruled out on the ground that the Incarnation is then no longer unique, that the uniqueness of the Resurrec¬ tion and the need for a miraculous birth become, alike, inexplicable, and that Christ’s death would not be the death of the Logos in the sense that it was the death of the flesh which he had taken and made personally his own flesh; it would be the death of a man associated with the Logos, and therefore, on Athanasius’ principles, it could not be a saving death.3 Athanasius therefore has to combine his assertion of the total deity of the Son with the Alexandrian insistence that the subject of the experiences recorded in the Gospels is the Son. A personal being who was in the fullest sense God came down from heaven; the Logos became flesh. One aspect of his Christology is thus clear enough. The Logos gives life and light to all things; he causes the world to be an ordered cosmos; it is at his providential bidding that the stars move, birds fly, trees grow, plants come up.4 The Incarnation did not deprive the universe of the omnipresent Logos. On the contrary, he continued, while in a fleshly body, to be immanent in all things and transcendent over all things, for the body imposed no limitation;5 rather, it was made the instrument of the Logos who had so appropriated it as to make it his own.6 It is thus the Logos who is the personal subject of the Gospel story. On the other side, Athanasius’ Christology is much less definite. He finds it, as we should expect, extremely hard to maintain the reality of the human experiences of which the Logos was the subject. For the Anans it was not difficult to attribute hunger, thirst, sorrow, and ignorance (of the last day) to the Logos, nor to avoid embarrassment at the texts which spoke of his inferiority to the Father; these were all the very passages which supported the thesis that the Logos is created and mutable. Athanasius has to explain them otherwise, and he tries to do so by ascribing all human weakness and suffering to the flesh. Because the Logos had condescended to make human flesh his own he could be said to appropriate its experiences, including those of ignorance and fear, and speak of them as his own. As Logos he knew the day and the hour; as Logos he could not pray that the 1 2 8 4 5 6

inc. 8, 9, 20. Epict. 2. ib. io-ii; cf. Adelph. gent. 44. inc. 17. ib. 8, 18; Ar. 3.35.

3.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

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cup might pass from him; but as the Logos who had assumed human flesh he could as it were come down to the level of flesh, for the edification and salvation of men, and take its weaknesses on himself.1 This Christology clearly verges on the docetic. Athanasius increased the difficulty for himself by operating, like Arius, with two concepts; the divine Logos and the human flesh. He does not bring a human rational soul into his Christological scheme, and such of the human experiences as cannot be ascribed to the flesh have therefore to be explained away. The question has been much discussed whether at a late stage in his development Athanasius changed his view on this matter. When the formal and explicit denial by Apollinarius of a human soul in Christ was becoming a question of public controversy, Athanasius’ council at Alexandria in 362 declared that the Saviour’s body did not lack ‘soul’, ‘sense’, or ‘mind’. Since the idea of a human mind or rational soul in Christ continued to play no positive role in Athanasius’ Christology, it has been plausibly argued that this statement means simply that the human body was not inanimate, but animated by the Logos, the Logos being its mind. Apollinarius certainly explained the council’s declara¬ tion in this sense, but it is an interpretation which strains the sense of the statement, which goes on: ‘it was impossible, since the Lord became man for us, that his body should be without mind, nor was it the salvation of the body alone but also of the soul which was effected in the Logos himself’2 words which are paralleled in the Epistle to Epictetus: ‘our salvation is not a fantasy, nor was it the salvation of the body alone, but of the whole man, soul and body, that took place in the Logos himself.’3 The latter point would not be met by Apollinarius’ interpretation of the council’s words: indeed, it stands in contradiction to Apollinarius’ soteriology. It seems likely that Apollinarius was trying to explain the declaration away; it conflicted with his own idea that Christ’s body was a ‘temple’ of the Logos, prefigured by Solomon’s temple which was without soul, mind or will. So it may be that Athanasius came formally to acknowledge the completeness of Christ’s manhood, though without developing the implications of this. In any case, he stretched the meaning of ‘flesh’ far enough to ascribe to it a will.4 From 350 onwards, when Constantius reigned as sole emperor (the Western Nicene party having until then enjoyed the support of Constans), the explicitly Arianizing party had the active backing of the secular authority. The formula produced by the second council of Sirmium in 357 (called by Hilary the ‘blasphemy of Sirmium’) affirms the Trinity, citing the baptismal formula of Mt. 28:19 which for Athanasius had been a proof of the homoousion, but insists on the ‘two persons’ of Father and Son and strongly emphasizes the inferiority and subordination of the latter to the former; at the same time it deprecates speculation concerning the divine substance and, in particular, the use of the terms homoousion and homoiouAr. 3.34-57. tom. ad Ant. 7; cf. Apollinarius ep. Diocaes. Laodicea und seine Schule, pp. 256, 204). 3 Epict. 7. 4 deer. 31. 1 see the long discussion in 2

2 and

ft.

2 (Lietzmann,

Apollinaris von

no

A History of Christian Doctrine

sion (of like substance).1 Some were prepared to acknowledge, simply, that the Son is like the Father, while refusing to discuss the question of sub¬ stance, and this point of view was embodied in the creeds of the councils of Nice in Thrace in 359, Seleucia and Ariminum in the same year (the Western bishops for the most part subscribing under imperial pressure), and Constantinople in 360. A much more positive and extreme Arian theology was worked out by Aetius, Eunomius and others, asserting the unlikeness in substance of the Son to the Father, though likeness could be predicated of their operations since the Son participated by grace in the operation of the Father.2 The creed of Eudoxius, bishop of Constantinople, reflects the outlook of this ‘Anomoean’ (anomoios, ‘unlike') party, in its assertion that the one God, the Father, is alone ingenerate, that the Son is the first and chief of creatures, and that he was made flesh, but not man, since he took flesh without a human soul.3 In reaction against this movement those who, without inclining at all to Arianism, had opposed the Nicene formula through fear of ‘Sabellianism’ drew closer to the position of Athanasius. They acknowledged that, as Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem, stated in his exposition of the baptismal creed, the Son is God begotten of God, like his begetter in all respects.4 He, and those who shared his views, were always anxious to preserve the distinctness between the Father and the Son: to deny the concept of ‘Son-Fatherhood’;6 but they ascribed the unity of the Son with the Father not merely to an identity of will or operation but to a common deity.6 From this position it was no long step to the declaration of the council of Ancyra (358), led by Basil, the bishop of that city: that the Son, who is an ousia (here denoting ‘individual entity’ or ‘person’) and not an impersonal divine activity (as Marcellus believed), is like the Father in respect of substance. This council anathematized the homoousion, associating this with tautoousion ‘identical in substance', or, if ousia retains the meaning indicated above, ‘identical as an individual entity’), but it opened up the possibility, which the council of Sirmium had rejected, of speaking of homoiousion? This term became characteristic of the theology of Basil of Ancyra, George, bishop of Laodicea, and others who, while still anxious not to compromise the distinctness of the two hypostases, were moving nearer to the Nicene position in the face of the developed Arianism of the ‘Anomoeans’. A formula drawn up in 359 by George of Laodicea asserted likeness in substance between the Father and Son as distinct hypostases and identity of deity.8 At about this time Athanasius explicitly recognized that this party shared his own view, differing only in respect of their hesitation over the actual term homoousion; if they were content to acknowledge that the Son is both ‘of like substance' with the Father and 1 2 3 4 5 • 7 8

Hilary syn. 11 (Hahn, p. 200). Eunomius apol. 24, 26. Hahn, p. 261; see above, p. 97. catech. 4.7. ib. 11.16. ib. Epiphanius haer. 73.2ft. (Hahn, pp. 201-4). ib. 73.12ff.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

hi

of the Father’s substance, they were in agreement with what the homoousion was intended to signify.1 The fact that Athanasius himself took care to dispel misunderstandings helped towards a rapprochement. If two objects are consubstantial, he explained, this does not mean that they must be collaterally derived from a third substance anterior to them both; the one may be derived simply from the other and yet be consubstantial with it.2 He could also equate ‘consubstantial’ with ‘of the same nature’, and say that as men we are homoousioi with one another.3 He continued, indeed, to maintain that homoiousios was inappropriate to one who is by nature, and not by participation, God. For a natural identity homoousios is the proper term.4 Hilary of Poitiers, however, who was involved in the Eastern controversies while in exile from his diocese from 356 to 359, was ready to concede the propriety of either term: homoousion as safeguarding the identity of essence which ‘likeness in respect of essence’ implied, and homoiousion as preserving the distinctness of the hypostases which were acknowledged as being identical in essence.5 Further, the important council held by Athanasius at Alexandria in 362 did much to clarify the identity of outlook which subsisted between those who used the theological terms in different sense and were therefore suspicious of one another’s jargon. Some spoke of ‘three hypostases’; but by this they did not, it was now acknowl¬ edged, mean three different ousiai in the sense of three principles or three Gods. Others spoke of ‘one hypostasis’, but it was now clear that by this they meant one ousia: that the Son is of the Father’s substance and possesses one and the same divine nature with him. They did not intend to deny the distinction of Father, Son and Holy Spirit or to affirm that either the Son or the Spirit is not an individually subsisting entity.6 With this clarification the post-Nicene debate could resolve itself into a straight argument between a fully developed Trinitarian theology on the one hand and sheer Arianism on the other. The final steps towards such a Trinitarian theology were taken by the ‘Cappadocian Fathers’, that is, Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa and their associate Gregory of Nazianzus, and to a lesser degree by Didymus of Alexandria and Evagrius Ponticus. The argument with Arianism, as this was carried on in the treatises of Basil, Gregory of Nyssa and Didymus against Eunomius, for example, was largely a matter of developing the lines of thought already laid down by Athanasius. In one field, however, the issue was still un¬ decided: the question of the deity of the Holy Spirit. As late as the delivery of his Theological Orations (Orations 27-31), probably in 380, Gregory of Nazianzus complains that the subject is hard, and that some regard the Spirit as a divine operation, some as a creature, others as God, while others again either take up an agnostic position on the ground that Scripture gives, no clear guidance here, or make a broad hierarchical distinction 1 2 3 4 5 6

Ath. syn. 41. ib. 51. Serap. 2.3. syn. 53. Hilary syn. 84ft. Ath. tom. ad Ant. 5-6.

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between the Spirit and the Father and Son.1 A few years earlier Eustathius of Sebaste, one of the group which had held the Council of Ancyra in 358, had emerged as the leader of a party of Pneumatomachoi, ‘fighters against the Spirit’.2 The historian Socrates associates with this party Macedonius, bishop of Constantinople, after his deposition in favour of the Arian Eudoxius, and gives them the alternative name, ‘Macedonians’.3 Socrates, and also Didymus,4 indicate that they refused positively to speak of the Spirit as a creature, but that they could not acknowledge him to be God. One of the difficulties was the lack of positive Scriptural teaching, and Gregory Nazianzen, admitting this, has to contend that it was not until after man had assimilated the revelation of the Son that God could reveal, after the close of the period of the Canon, the truth about the being of the Spirit.5 There was also the difficulty of explaining the relation of the Spirit to the Father and the Son in such a way as to avoid a duplication of ‘begotten’ deity, that is, an assertion of two Sons who are brothers, or a duplication of the unbegotten principle, that is, two Fathers.6 In the back¬ ground, less explicitly stated, was the more serious problem that the Logos doctrine had already served to give an account of God transcendent and God immanent and it was difficult to find an adequate theological place for a third Person. The argument of the Cappadocians starts from the scriptural testimony to the work of the Spirit and the parallel witness of Christian worship and devotion in the formula of baptism, the traditional doxology, and the experience of the Spirit’s work of sanctification. This line of argument is developed most fully in Basil’s treatise On the Holy Spirit, the conclusion of which is that the Spirit cannot possibly be reckoned among creatures, for he operates what is proper to God and is reckoned with, and not below, the Father and Son in the regular worship of Christians. Further, the Nicene formula was extremely terse about the Spirit, but only because no contro¬ versy had then arisen under this head; it is now right, says Basil, to affirm that the Spirit, who is glorified with the Father and the Son, is holy by nature, just as the Father is holy and the Son is holy, that he must not be separated from the Father and the Son, but that this does not mean that we should assert either that he is ingenerate, which the Father alone is, or that he is generate, which the Son alone is. We are to maintain that he ‘proceeds’ from the Father, and in this way is of the Father without being created; for the Holy Spirit is not to be included among the created ‘ministering spirits’7 - in refutation of an ancient tendency to include the Holy Spirit among the angels, or at least, as Anomoean theology was doing,8 to link the hierarchical ordering of Son and Holy Spirit directly and, as it 1 Gr. Naz. or. 31.2-5. 2 Bas. ep. 263.3. 3 Socr. h.e. 2.45. 4 Didym. Trin. 2.8. 5 Gr. Naz. or. 31.24-27. 6 ib. 31.7; Didym. Trin. 2.5. 7 Bas. ep. 125. 8 e.g., Homily 2.i5ff. of the Anomoean Homilies published by J. Liebart (Sources chretiennes 146).

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

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were, without a break with an hierarchical order of angels. Since the Spirit has not himself received sanctification and life, but is holy and life-giving by nature, he can impart these gifts; he is therefore not to be separated from the Trinity but is, as God, consubstantial with the Father.1 Gregory of Nyssa makes a significant addition to Basil’s statement about the ‘procession’ of the Spirit. The Spirit is derived from the Father and is also ‘of the Son’; he proceeds from the Father through the Son, like a third light kindled through the medium of a second light from a first light.2 This language is important in view of later controversies arising from the Western adoption of the doctrine of the ‘double procession’ of the Spirit from the Father and the Son. At this stage, however, no clear-cut distinction as between East and West had yet arisen on this issue; Gregory’s formula¬ tion represents the subsequent doctrine of the East, but although adum¬ brations of the theory of double procession may be discerned in Hilary they are also present in the Eastern theologian Epiphanius. To distinguish ‘procession’ from ‘generation’ sufficed as a verbal weapon to repel Pneumatomachian attacks. It was impossible, however, to give any meaningful content to the distinction. The Johannine concept of a ‘proceeding’ of the Spirit from the Father was never intended to be understood with reference to the internal relations of the person of the Godhead to one another and it did not lend itself to transference to this quite different sphere of thought. The Cappadocians’ positive task was to explain and define the orthodox theology which had emerged from the long controversy. The old confusion in terminology over the meaning of ousia and hypostasis which had exercised Athanasius’ council at Alexandria in 362 had to be cleared up. Hypostasis was now defined as denoting a particular existent. It is related to the term ousia, which denotes a universal essence, as the proper name ‘Paul’ is to the generic word ‘man’.3 Ousia denotes the universal being in which every existing particular has a share; hypostasis denotes the particular which is differentiated by its individual properties. Thus the oneness of deity is affirmed in the assertion that the Son is of the same ousia as the Father, while by calling him, and each of the other two, an hypostasis the distinction between Father, Son and Holy Spirit is preserved.4 In this way unity is safeguarded by the acknowledgment of the single Godhead and the dis¬ tinction of ‘persons’ (prosopa; i.e. ‘individual presentations’) is maintained by the recognition of the distinctive properties of each.5 This equation of ousia and hypostasis with universal and particular could obviously lend itself to a tritheistic interpretation. The analogy often drawn by the Cappadocians with three particular men who are one by virtue of the common manhood of which they all partake could readily suggest that there are three Gods who are one because they all share a common deity. But in fact the Cappadocians insist most emphatically on the absolute oneness of God. There is a total identity of nature or substance.6 1 2 3 4 6 6

Bas. ep. 159; Gr. Naz. or. 31.10. Gr. Nyss. Maced. 2, 6, 10, 12. Gr. Nyss. (Pseudo-Bas) ep. 38.3. Bas. ep. 214.4. ep. 236.6. Gr. Naz. or. 42.15; 30.20.

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A History of Christian Doctrine

This makes it actually impossible to say that the Son is either unlike or like the Father.1 It is manifested in, and acknowledgment of it is necessitated by, the absolute identity of the operations of the three persons. There is one activity; therefore one and the same nature.2 The three men in the analogy are distinguished by variety of operation; in the Trinity there is but one single operation.3 Indeed, his Platonist insistence on the reality, and the priority, of universals leads Gregory of Nyssa to think that, so far from understanding the ‘manhood’ of the three ‘men’ as merely an abstract concept, it might be possible to speak of them, and indeed of all men, as ‘one man’.4 5 This extreme emphasis on unity leads to great caution in apply¬ ing the concept of number to the ‘persons’ at all. Each hypostasis can be mentioned severally, but though we enumerate them together this does not imply polytheism; for the numbers (one Father, one Son, one Holy Spirit) cannot be added up. They are individually, as distinct prosopa, one, one and one; but in respect of being God they are one and not three. It is possible to say that the Father is one and the Son is one; but not that they are ‘one and one’ to make two Gods. A king and his picture do not add up to two kings; the honour paid to the image passes through it to the original. And what the picture is by way of imitation the Son is by nature; the image is not constituted in his case by community of form but by common deity.6 God is one in the sense that he is absolutely incomposite.6 Hence Evagrius replies to accusations of tritheism by saying that God is one, not in number but in nature.7 The conclusion is that undifferentiated deity subsists in distinct persons.8 In the last resort the difficulty involved in this theology is less that of avoiding tritheism as of assigning any content to the distinction of the hypostases. There is no difference in their activity; one and the same activity is predicated of the one deity. Yet the course of theological speculation which culminated in the full Trinitarian doctrine had been embarked on in the beginning largely with the object of making it possible to predicate distinctions of operation without denying the principle of monotheism. Here was an insoluble problem. The Cappadocians try to assign peculiar properties to the several hypostases; but Basil’s attempt to ascribe to them Fatherhood, Sonship and sanctification, respectively, is unsatisfactory.9 ‘Sanctification’ is an activity, whereas Fatherhood and Sonship are modes of subsistence; and, if there is one and the same opera¬ tion of the Godhead as such, it is useless to attempt to distinguish any one hypostasis by assigning to it a specific activity such as sanctification. In the end the only possible distinctions were in a sense tautologous: that which distinguishes the Father is that he is Father, the Son that he is Son, the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Evagr. (Pseudo-Bas.) ep. 8.3. Gr. Nyss. (Pseudo-Bas.) ep. 189.6. Gr. Nyss. quod non sint tres dii (PG. 45.125). ib. (120). Bas. Spir. 18.44, 45Gr. Naz. ep. 243. Evagr. (Ps.-Bas.) ep. 8.2. Gr. Naz. or. 31.14. ep. 236.6.

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Spirit that he is the Spirit of the Father and the Son; or, which is the same thing, that the distinctive property of the Father is unbegottenness, of the Son begottenness, of the Spirit procession.1 Thus it came to be recognized that the distinct properties of the three are their modes of subsistence or modes of relationship;2 yet, when it had to be admitted that no explanation could be given of the difference between the modes of subsistence of the Son and the Spirit,3 it might well seem that abstract speculation had lost contact with reality. The one case in which Greek theology was able to give solid content to a hypostatic distinction was its insistence that the Father alone is the principle and fountain-head of deity, which is imparted by him to the Son and the Spirit: a continuing vestige of the hierarchical Trinity of pre-Nicene theology. The victory of Nicene orthodoxy over Arianism was sealed by the expanded creed traditionally designated ‘Nicene’ in service-books such as the Book of Common Prayer. This creed is often known as the ‘NicenoConstantinopolitan Creed’, for the Council of Chalcedon in 451, when endorsing it, referred to it as the creed of the ‘hundred and fifty Fathers’, that is, of the so-called Second Ecumenical Council (which was in fact an Eastern synod only), assembled at Constantinople by the orthodox emperor Theodosius I in 381. Those parts of this creed which relate to belief in the Father and the Son are generally similar to the creed of 325, though with certain notable differences. Whereas, however, the ‘third article’ of the creed of Nicaea contained nothing more than the bare assertion, ‘and (we believe) in the Holy Spirit’, in this later creed that article is greatly expanded and reflects the developed theology of Athanasius and the Cappadocians, at least to the extent of ascribing to the Holy Spirit divine operations and affirming that he is worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son. It does not, however, proceed from speaking about the Spirit’s operation and his dignity to speaking about his being, and in this creed the homoousion of the Spirit is not explicitly asserted. What indirect connection this creed has with the council of 381 is very obscure. The traditional belief that it is that council’s official revision and expansion of the creed of Nicaea is improbable in view of the difference between the Christological sections of the two creeds, the silence about this creed before the Council of Chalcedon, and the possibility that the virtually identical creed contained in Epiphanius’ treatise Ancoratus may have been in existence before 381. Having, however, received ecumenical endorsement at Chalcedon, it superseded the creed of 325 as the norm of ‘Nicene’ orthodoxy and as the standard Eastern baptismal creed. Meanwhile, in the West, the orthodox attack on Arianism had taken a fresh and interesting form in the writings of Victorinus Afer, the professional philosopher whose dramatic conversion to Christianity in about 355 made a profound impression on Augustine when the story of it was recounted to him as he was approaching a similar decision. His books, Againt Arius and On the Generation of the Divine Word, with three theological hymns, are 1 Gr. Naz. or. 25.16; 29.2. 2 Amphilochius fr. 15. 3 Gr. Naz. or. 31.8.

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A History of Christian Doctrine

extremely difficult; Jerome thought them unintelligible to non-experts. Their approach to the problem, however, is original, for Victorinus attempts to construct a Trinitarian theology out of Neoplatonist presuppositions modified by Christian insights. He finds an analogy to the modes of being of the Godhead in the inner life of the soul, which is a real reflection of the Trinity. In the soul Victorinus discerns three modes: being, living, and understanding. Undifferentiated being receives form by living and comes, in ‘understanding’, to knowledge of itself (self-consciousness).1 These modes correspond to the sequence: substance, form, and concept. So in the Trinity the Father is pure undifferentiated being. Victorinus occasionally follows Plotinus in refusing to attribute being to God because God is beyond (transcending) being itself;2 but usually he diverges at this point from the Neoplatonist outlook and rejects its negative theology. The Son is form or life, categorized being, the Father made knowable. He is the self-revelation of the Father,3 for which Victorinus used the ancient image of the Word emerging from silence.4 The Son is the express image of the Father and there is mutual knowledge between Father and Son, knowledge being an active desire for an object and thus to be identified with will. The Spirit is related to the Son as self-consciousness is to life. In the Spirit the divine being which is self-revealed in the Son knows (and wills, or actively desires) itself. The Spirit is the communication of the Word,5 and the link of mutual understanding between the Father and the Son.6 There is thus within the Godhead an eternal movement, as it were, outwards in self-revelation (progressio) and returning back (regressus) into its source.7 The Spirit unites the Father and the Son by reuniting the Father’s self-revelation with him¬ self. This process does not mean that there is mutability in God. Victorinus is original in holding that God is unchangeably dynamic. God’s essence is motion;8 generation and creation belong inherently to his being.9 ‘God the Father’, says a modern expositor of Victorinus’ system, ‘is essentially a stupendous virtuality, brimming with Life and Power, but as yet undeter¬ mined or defined by Form or Thought.’10 It follows that Victorinus under¬ stands the homoousion in terms of identity of activity. There is one move¬ ment, one operation. God is one being, one life, one understanding.11 God exists in a threefold manner;12 and each of the three modes is identical with the divine essence and with all the divine attributes, for God does not possess attributes: he is his attributes and they are his being.13 Victorinus anticipated in a number of important respects the more fully 1 2 3 4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Victorinus adv. Ar. 1.32, 62. ib. 4.23. ib. 3.7; 4.20. ib. 1.13. ib. 3.16. ib. 1.60. hymn. 1. adv. Ar. 1.43. gen. verb. 29. Paul Henry, JTS NS. 1.1 (1950), p. 50. adv. Ar. 3.4, 17. ib. 2.4. ib. 1.4.

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developed Trinitarian theology of Augustine. Augustine’s thought on this subject is worked out in a vast number of passages in the great library of his writings, but it is concentrated especially in his fifteen books On the Trinity which represent his thinking during a period of twenty years in the middle of his episcopate (399-419). Augustine, too, starts from the one-ness of the divine essence and tries to work from this basic presupposition towards a rational statement of the Trinitarian theology which he accepts as an unquestioned datum. He, too, believes that theology can speak intelligibly, though of course only in the consciousness that it is dabbling on the edge of an unfathomable mystery, about the internal structure of deity as distinct from that self-disclosure of God in the ‘economy’ which had been the chief concern of the Eastern and earlier Western theologians. He, too, holds that each person of the Godhead is identical with the divine essence, so that the fact that Christ is ‘the wisdom of God’ according to St. Paul does not mean that the Father is wise only because he is the begetter of the Son who is Wisdom. The Father is wise; the Son is the expression of this.1 For Augustine, as for Victorinus, everything in God is the single divine essence. Augustine, too, develops greatly the approach to an understanding of the relations within God by the analogy of the inward operations of the soul. Augustine’s object is to show ‘that the Trinity is the one and only and true God, and how Father, Son and Holy Spirit are rightly believed to be of one and the same substance or essence’.2 It is the Trinity itself which is God. The three are strictly identical in essence, and are not consubstantial in the sense of participating in a generic unity;3 indeed, Augustine does not use the term ‘consubstantial’ and he thinks that even to employ ‘substance’ with reference to God is strictly incorrect, since it should properly be used of mutable and composite entities, subjects which possess attributes, whereas God is absolutely simple and is his attributes. He prefers to use ‘essence’.4 5 There is thus absolute equality in the Godhead. Whereas it is broadly true to say that earlier Trinitarian theology had conceived of an hierarchically ordered deity of three, related to each other in a vertical descending order of derivation, as it were, Augustine substitutes for the image of a vertical line an equilateral triangle, any one of whose three points may be uppermost: the whole triangle is God. ‘The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are one and the same substance in indivisible equality.’6 Hence whatever is ascribed to God in himself is also ascribed to each of the three severally: thus the Father is almighty, the Son is almighty, and the Holy Spirit is almighty, but yet there are not three ‘almighties’ but one ‘almighty’.6 The Father is perfect, the Son perfect, and the Spirit perfect; but this does not mean that God is greater than each of them severally, for Father, Son and Spirit are one perfect God. The unity of Son with Father 1 2 3 4 5 8

Aug. Trin. 6.1-3. ib. 1.4. Jo. tract. 39-2ff. Trin. 7.10. ib. 1.7. ib. 5-9-

n8

A History of Christian Doctrine

and Spirit with Father and Son does not mean that God is a kind of sum total of three.1 This does not imply that there are no distinctions; it says in Jn. 10:30, ‘I and the Father are (not ‘is’) one’. But in acknowledging that there are three Augustine finds it very hard to answer the question, ‘Three what?’ The Greek formula, ‘one ousia, three hypostaseis will not go literally into Latin, for this would produce ‘one essentia, three substantiae’. Latin theology had therefore grown accustomed to speak of three personae. But Augustine does not like this term, and thinks it should be used, not for what it positively says, but simply to avoid having nothing to say at all.2 He wants above all to safeguard the one-ness of will and operation, and, although neither prosopon in Greek nor persona in Latin possessed the psychological connotations of our ‘person’, but signified only a distinct individual entity, he seems to have feared that to lay positive emphasis on the term persona might compromise the truth that Father, Son and Spirit are inseparable and operate inseparably.3 There is one will and an inseparable operation.4 This principle causes some difficulty in relation to the scriptural theophanies. They are not to be ascribed exclusively to the Son, as in earlier Trinitarian thought, but may be attributed either to any one of the three or to God the Trinity, always with the proviso that the nature or substance or essence, or whatever term may be used to speak of what God actually is in himself, cannot be made visible physically.5 To convey some idea of what may be meant by Trinity in identity Augustine seeks images of the Trinity in the structure of the soul. Since man is made in the image of God, he must in some degree reflect the Trinity; even the physical or ‘outward’ man which perishes (II Cor. 4:16) discloses a certain representation of the Trinity which is to be found in the relation between the perceiving subject, the perceived object, and the perception which links them, or between the object perceived, the perception of it, and the voluntary direction of the mind towards what is perceived;6 analogies in which Augustine had been partly anticipated by Victorinus.7 Within the soul are to be discerned the analogies of memory, understanding and will and of the mind, its self-knowledge and its self-love;8 an extension of the latter gives the triad, memory, knowledge and love, in respect of the soul's awareness of God.9 The last two of these analogies are a development of the idea of a triad of loving subject, loved object and the love which joins them.10 This last, however, is not in itself of great importance in Augustine’s own thought; although it has been used as a foundation for the idea of a ‘social Trinity’ this does not correspond with Augustine’s own theology, 1 2 3 4 8 8 7 8 8 10

ib. 6.9. ib. 5.10. ib. 1.7. ib. 2.9. ib. 2.12-34. ib. 11.iff. adv. Ar. 1.40. Trin. 10.18; 9.8. ib. i4.nff. ib. 9.2.

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which is too monistic to allow of such a concept: God’s love and knowledge, in this context, are knowledge and love of himself, not love subsisting between ‘persons’ in the modern sense of the word. Further, Augustine is well aware that these analogies are no more than very dim adumbrations of the reality. The activities or faculties of the mind or soul are not identical with its essence, as the three are identical with the divine essence.1 In God there is one activity, which is not the case with the human faculties, and the Trinity which is a triad of persons is more indivisible than the trinity in the soul which is only one person.2 Augustine is faced with what is really an impossible task: to explain what the distinctions between the three really are. He tries to answer this question by pointing out that the distinctions between Father, Son and Spirit are not substantial (which would imply tritheism), nor accidental (for with God there are no accidents), but relational.3 The Father is called Father only in relation to the Son, and so on. The ‘persons’ are real and eternally subsisting relations. Further, because ‘Son’ denotes a relation of ‘begottenness’ it is appropriate to ascribe certain operations, namely, those of the incarnate life, to the Son, even though the ‘economy’ was the work of the whole Trinity inasmuch as the three co-operated in a single operation.4 The procession of the Spirit is distinguished from the begetting of the Son by being an identical relation to the Father and to the Son whereas the generation of the Son is a relation to the Father only.5 He is the Spirit of both, but this does not imply that there are two sources of the Spirit for he proceeds from both by one and the same operation.6 Augustine’s Trinitarian theology found formal expression in the so-called ‘Athanasian Creed’,7 a didactic composition which gained a place in the West among the authoritative credal formulations. Its authorship is un¬ certain but its place of origin is in all probability southern France and its date seems likely to be the fifth century. ‘The Catholic Faith,’ it declares, ‘is this: that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, neither confusing the persons nor dividing the substance.’ There is one deity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, equal glory, co-eternal majesty. The attributes of each of the three are identical, for there is, for example, one uncreated and not three uncreated: the attributes are of God. Hence, while each person is to be acknowledged as God and Lord, there are not three Gods or three Lords. The distinctions are relational: the Father is not made, created or begotten; the Son is of the Father alone, not made nor created but begotten; the Spirit is of the Father and the Son, not made nor created nor begotten but proceeding. ‘And in this Trinity nothing is prior or posterior, nothing greater or less, but all three persons are co-etemal and co-equal’, so that ‘Unity is to be worshipped in Trinity and Trinity in Unity’. Here is a concise statement of Augustinian doctrine, with its immense emphasis on 1 2 8 4 6 6 7

ib. 15.7. ib. 15.43. ib. 5.6ff. ib. 2.2ff. ib. 1.7; 5.15; 15.47. ib. 15.46-47. Hahn, pp. i75~7-

V-

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the divine unity, on the relational nature of the distinctions of ‘persons’ and the consequent equality of the Father, Son and Spirit, and on the double procession of the Spirit. This last doctrine became characteristic of Western theology. It was formally affirmed in the profession of faith made by the Visigothic king Reccared and his bishops in their reception into Catholic orthodoxy from Arianism at the third council of Toledo in 589,1 and from that time the Filioque clause (‘proceeding from the Father and the Son’) was added to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as used in Spain, where in accordance with an enactment of the same council it was introduced into the eucharistic liturgy. By the end of the eighth century the liturgical use of the Creed with this unecumenical addition had established itself in France and in the eleventh century it was finally adopted at Rome. Later developments in Trinitarian theology in the East may be mentioned very briefly. Under the influence of the Christianized Neoplatonism of the sixth-century ‘Dionysius the Areopagite’ and Maximus the Confessor, his seventh-century commentator, the standard orthodoxy of the Greek world, as it was expounded by John of Damascus in the eighth century, laid great emphasis on the Neoplatonist principle that God is beyond all the positive attributes which may be conceived, and is beyond being itself. God’s essence is unknowable, for it transcends all categories of affirmative theology; hence to speak of his essence is to say what God is not rather than what he is.2 Within this general bracket, as it were, of ‘negative theology’ Trinitarian doctrine asserts the one-ness of the divine substance in three hypostases or prosopa, which are modes of the being of the one substance.3 These modes are conceived as ‘ingeneracy, generation and procession’ or ‘Fatherhood, Sonship and procession’, so that the distinction of persons is a distinction of relations;4 in no other respect is there any difference, and the three are inseparable, subsisting and operating within one another by a mutual interpenetration (perichoresis) yet without loss of relational distinctness.5 At the same time John of Damascus continues to assert, in the Eastern tradition, that the Father is the fountainhead and cause of the Son and the Spirit,6 and the Spirit proceeds from the Father as originator through the Son as co-operating intermediary7 — though how ‘procession’ differs from ‘generation’ John, like all other theologians, admits that he cannot tell.8

1 2 8 4 6 8 7 8

Hahn, p. 232; Mansi Concilia, vol. 9, p. 977. John of Damascus fid. orth, 1.4. ib. 1.8. ib. ib. 1.14. ib. 1.7-8; 2.12. ib. 1.12. ib. 1.8.

VIII THE CHRISTOLOGICAL CONTROVERSIES In this brief survey the problem of the relation between Trinitarian distinctions and the unity of God has been discussed for convenience’s sake in isolation from the problem of the relation between deity and manhood in the person of Christ. In the actual development of Christian thought, however, these two problems were always interconnected. Christological speculation, which we traced in its relation to Trinitarian theology down to Athanasius, did not stand still while the later stages of the Trinitarian development were being worked out. On the contrary, the emergence of the Nicene position as the dominant theology brought the problem of Christology out into the open and introduced a century of vigorous Christological controversy which continued in the East for a further two hundred and thirty years and resulted in schisms between ‘Orthodox’ and ‘Monophysite’ Christians that have not yet been healed. The Nicene faith rested ultimately on the soteriological convictions that it is through Christ that we are saved, and that salvation could not be effected by one who was less than God in the fullest possible sense of ‘God’. As we have seen in considering the thought of Athanasius, that faith rested on the application to soteriology of the principle, accepted as an unexamined axiom, that what is received through participation, or as a gift, and is not possessed naturally as an inherent property cannot be passed on to others; it is sufficient for the recipient alone. Hence the conclusion was drawn that Christ cannot be the saviour of mankind unless he is consubstantial with God the Father in respect of deity, and that neither an Arian Logos nor a Macedonian Holy Spirit can give life or sanctify. Yet, just because it grew out of soteriology, the Nicene faith in fact made the Christological problem insoluble. The Christ of the Alexandrian theo¬ logians is men’s saviour because he is the consubstantial Logos who, being unchangeable (atreptos), is able to save because he cannot succumb to sin and death. His divine power overcomes the weakness and sin of humanity, and, himself remaining unchanged and impassible, he unites manhood to deity and raises it as an offering to the Father.1 The Alexandrian Christology made it possible to affirm an incarnation of the Nicene Logos, but it did so at the cost of denying the full reality of that incarnation; the Logos of Athanasius and Cyril conquers temptation automatically. On the other side the Antiochene theologians also implicitly deny the full reality of the incarnation that they profess to preach, but for the opposite reason: 1 Cf. Cyril Heb. (Migne P.G. 74.985-8).

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namely, in order to safeguard the full reality of the saviour’s humanity. By his participation in the actual and complete nature of the human race Christ, according to the Antiochenes, effects its salvation. In asserting this, however, they have to pay the necessary price of denying a real incarnation of the Nicene Logos by separating the ‘assumed man’ from the impassible ‘God the Word’. Throughout the controversy the Christology of both sides was determined by soteriology, but a Christological impasse was unavoid¬ able in the last resort so long as soteriology clung to both of its axiomatic assumptions: the impassibility of God and the hypostatic subsistence of the Nicene Logos as the consubstantial God the Son. Christians generally were agreed that they wanted to affirm that ‘in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself’; that Jesus Christ is the Logos incarnate, yet that he was moved by human emotions, was affected by human weakness, and if he was not actually subject to ignorance he at least spoke as though he were - as the Gospels indicated with embarrassing clarity; that he died, as the central affirmations of Christian faith pro¬ claimed; that it is possible neither to affirm with naive monarchianism that God is passible, nor to deny with Arianism that the Logos is absolute God. All wanted- to affirm that Christ’s divine actions, such as miracles, and his human experiences, such as sorrow, suffering and death, were to be attri¬ buted to a single personal subject, the Logos incarnate. The problem was how these affirmations were to be made without contradiction and without reducing the force of any of them. The controversy was between those who sought a solution by ascribing the weaknesses and suffering, and the human experiences generally, to the man whom the Logos assumed and indwelt, and those who attempted to maintain that in some sense they are the human experiences of God the Logos, yet without predicating passibility of deity as such. In addition to the 'conviction that only one who is personally and sub¬ stantially God can be men’s saviour, certain other deeply held beliefs and presuppositions were focal points in this controversy. They included the presuppositions of Hellenistic theology which caused the limitations and suffering of the incarnate Logos to be seen as humiliations, experiences which, far from revealing the nature of God, are alien to it and paradoxical; the determination to safeguard the absolute uniqueness of the Incarnation and at the same time to interpret man’s salvation in terms of deification; and the growing ‘realism’ of eucharistic theology which, maintaining that the bread is ontologically the flesh of Christ, has to go on to assert either that if this flesh is not the actual flesh of the Logos himself it cannot be deifying, or that if this flesh is not consubstantial with our own human flesh it may be potentially deifying but cannot deify us. Athanasius had attempted to maintain that the Logos was the subject of genuine human experiences without ceasing to be eternally the subject of divine activity. His Christology was carried further, indeed to extreme lengths with all its logical consequences drawn out, by Apollinarius, bishop of Laodicea, in teaching which began soon after the middle of the fourth century, became a matter of public discussion at Athanasius’ council at Alexandria in 362, and a subject of acute controversy in the succeeding

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decade. His theory of the union of the divine and the human in Christ is apparently clear-cut and simple, as Christology can be when it approaches the problem from the divine side, as it were, and reasons from what is conceived to be the nature of the Logos who came down from heaven. Apollinarius believed that Jesus Christ is, simply, the divine Logos. The eternal Son and the Jesus who walked in Galilee is (not ‘are’) one and the same unchanging person. Certainly, the figure described in the Gospels is a human figure; but the ruling principle which determines that figure’s every thought, word and action is the Logos. It is his flesh which is human, and this flesh the Logos has appropriated to himself so as to make it the flesh of the Logos, the flesh of the unchanging divine person. It is united with the Logos in such a way as in no respect to alter, add to, or diminish the divine nature, though the assumption and appropriation of human flesh so as to make it actually his own involves a voluntary self-limitation in respect of the operation of the Logos in and through a body. There is no place in this union for a human soul, for this would imply a certain duality in the one person. This, in turn, means that the flesh is moved by the Logos and not by human reason and will; and since an essential characteristic of the human will is that it is variable and liable to move either with or against the will of God, Christ, possessing no human freedom of moral choice, is sinless in the sense of being by nature incapable of sinning. The flesh, Apollinarius points out, is not a complete living creature by itself, but is moved by some agency external to itself; Christ’s flesh became appro¬ priated by, and united to, the Logos as its own ruling principle, so that the experiences proper to it, such as suffering, became those of the Logos, while the divine activity proper to the Logos became that of the flesh. Here is the idea, which played a great role in later Christology, of the interchange of properties (communicatio idiomatum). It is, according to Apollinarius, a real interchange, possible because the flesh has become God’s flesh, and so is now a living creature since it is united with the divine in such a way as to be one nature with it.1 In a famous passage, later adopted by Cyril of Alexandria under the impression that it was the work of Athanasius (under whose name, together with those of Julius of Rome and Gregory Thaumaturgus of Cappadocia, much of Apollinarius’ surviving work was preserved), he says that the same is Son of God and God according to the Spirit, and Son of Man according to the flesh (here using Rom. 1:3-4, a favourite text of the opposing, Antiochene tradition); but, he continues, the one Son is not two natures, one to be worshipped and one not, but ‘one incarnate nature of God the Word, worshipped together with his flesh with one worship’. There are not two sons, the one being true God and worshipped as such, the other a man derived from Mary and not worshipped, but by grace made to be son of God in the sense in which men may become sons of God; but there is the one Son of God who is from God, and it is the same and not another who was born, according to the flesh, of Mary. He who was born of Mary was Son of God by nature, not by grace and participation, and was man only in respect of the flesh derived from Mary. According to the flesh he died, while remaining impassible and immutable in respect of his deity; he 1 fr. 107 (Lietzmann, Apollinaris von Laodicea und seine Schule, p. 232).

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ascended into heaven in so far as his flesh, the flesh of the Logos, was exalted, while being eternally omnipresent and uncircumscribed.1 The union of humanity and deity is comparable with that of soul and body in man; deity and flesh remain unconfused, but form one entity.2 This means that just as a man is a single nature, so is Christ; hence it is possible to say that the Son of Man came down from heaven and that the Son of God was born of a woman.3 There is a one-ness of nature (henosis physike) of flesh and Logos; there is ‘one nature, one hypostasis, one operation, one person [prosopon), the same wholly God and wholly man’.4 Christ’s body is God’s body, and not consubstantial with man’s body if that implies that, like the latter, it is a ‘body of death’ needing to receive the gift of life; for in fact it is a ‘body of life’.5 This last point is explained by Apollinarius as follows. The Incarnation means, not that Christ is man, but that he is ‘as man’ (cf. Phil. 2:8); hence, strictly speaking, he is not consubstantial with man.6 On the other hand, in respect of his flesh alone he is consubstantial with man; or rather, his flesh is not consubstantial with God but with our flesh, for it did not come down from heaven but was assumed by the Logos who did come down from heaven.7 In making this assertion Apollinarius is repudiating the suggestion of his opponents that he maintained that Christ’s flesh was by origin divine (‘from heaven’), a misunderstanding of the sense in which he affirmed that the flesh is the flesh of the divine Logos. It was not by nature that the flesh was divine, but by its union with the Logos8 which makes it possible to say that Christ with his flesh is consubstantial with God and that the flesh, being the flesh of the one who is consubstantial with God, can be called God.9 Apollinarius claims that he never wishes to affirm that the Saviour’s flesh is from heaven, nor that the flesh as flesh is consubstantial with God, since as flesh it is not God, but inasmuch as it has been united with deity so as to be one prosopon it is God.10 Hence, as he frequently reiterates, the flesh is worshipped inasmuch as it is one prosopon and one living being with the Logos.11 In a summary of his doctrine Apollinarius recognizes that Christ is both God and man; otherwise he would be no mediator between God and man, nor would he act sometimes in a divine way, as in saving the world, and some¬ times in a human way, as in dying in order to save it. But a man ‘energized’ by God is not God: a body joined to God is God. Christ is God; he is therefore not a man energized by God but a body united with God. If what was born of Mary was a temple of God (Apollinarius here uses the analogy which was often employed by Athanasius as well as by Antiochene theologians), the ep. Jov. 1-2 (p. 25if.). fr. 129 (p. 239). 3 ep. Dion. 1.4-5 (P- 258). 4 fr. 148 (p. 247); fid. et inc.

1

9

6 (p. 198L).

6 A- xi6 (p. 235).

6 fr. 45 Hr. 8 fr.

(p. 214).

163 (p. 255).

160 (p. 254).

153 (P- 248). Dion. 2 (p. 262). 11 fr. 85 (p. 225); cf. un.

9 A10 ep.

2 (p. 186).

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

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miracle of his virgin birth would be unnecessary, for men may be temples of God without any such birth. If Christ's nature were the same as ours his humanity would be the ‘old man’, a ‘living soul’ (I Cor. 15:45) and not a ‘life-giving spirit’. But Christ gives life and is life-giving spirit; therefore he does not share our nature.1 This last point is of great importance for Apollinarius’ idea of man’s need for a wholly divine saviour, and for the soteriological arguments which were soon advanced against his Christoiogy. It is connected with the belief that there can be no place for a human rational soul in Christ, and hence no mutable will. If Christ is, simply, God incarnate, his flesh is directly and absolutely controlled by God and un¬ assailable by the passions which belong to human beings.2 In the view of Apollinarius the divine operation supplies the place of the human soul and mind. There cannot be two intellectual and volitional principles co-existing in Christ, for if there were then at least in theory there could be conflict between them. The Logos, then, did not assume a soul, but simply a body which, as the temple of the Logos, was foreshadowed by Solomon’s temple which lacked soul, mind and will.3 The language which he uses here corres¬ ponds to that which the Council of Alexandria repudiated, and may point to the likelihood that Athanasius was prepared in 362 to acknowledge a human rational soul in Christ even though the concept had been alien to his own Christoiogy and continued to play no positive part in it. What had tended to be an unexamined assumption of both Athanasius and Arius had now been brought out into the open by Apollinarius and made a basic theological principle. If the Logos did not indwell Christ as a holy man, in the way in which he dwelt in the prophets, then, according to Apollinarius, he became flesh, not assuming a human rational mind which would be mutable and liable to be led captive by evil thoughts, but a mind that was divine, heavenly and immutable.4 For Apollinarius to say that the Logos ‘assumed’ a heavenly mind is odd; for the Logos, according to him, is that mind5 or takes the place of a mind. He is, in fact, at this point trying to explain, or explain away, the language of the Council of Alexandria and probably finding it difficult to harmonize it with his own Christoiogy.6 From all this it follows that Christ’s flesh is the source of divinization to those who partake of it; it is saving and life-giving because deity belongs inherently and essentially to it.7 It was, however, precisely in respect of its soteriological weakness that the teaching of Apollinarius was most vigor¬ ously attacked. Origen had pointed out long ago that if the Logos did not assume complete manhood the whole man is not saved.8 The same point was driven home by the Cappadocians, especially in the Irenaean argument used by Gregory Nazianzen that Christ would not be the new Adam unless he assumed Adam’s nature in its completeness (an answer to Apollinarius’ fear 1 anac. 17-24 (pp. 244-245). 2 kata meros pistis 30 (p. 178). 3 fr. 2 (p. 204). 4 ep. Diocaes. 2. (p. 256). 5 A- 155 (P- 249)6 See above, p. 109.

7 A- 155 (P- 249); A8 Or. dial. p. 136.

116 (p. 235).

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that if Christ’s nature were not different from ours he would be merely the ‘old man’),1 and in his well-known phrase, ‘What has not been assumed remains unhealed’.2 Indeed, it was of supreme importance that the human rational soul should have been assumed, for this is the seat of sin and the original agent of Adam’s disobedience.3 Didymus makes the same point, that Christ’s soul is effective in the salvation of our soul just*as his body, homoousion with ours, is in the salvation of the body.4 * Belief in salvation through Christ requires the recognition that God united to himself a human soul capable of sinning; otherwise, that is, if, as Apollinarius thought, Christ was different in essence from men in respect of the most important element in the human make-up, the humanity of Christ would be reduced to the animal level.6 Gregory of Nyssa, who makes this last point, goes on to claim that Apollinarius is worse than Arius: Arius lowered the nature of the uncreated Son to the level of the created angels; Apollinarius reduces Christ to the level of the fleshly. Here Gregory is being unfair; Apollinarius would reply that he was exalting fleshly nature to the divine level, not degrading God to the level of flesh. Gregory himself, however, wants to say the same thing, in different language: there is a ‘mixture’ of God with human nature, which is like the sun shining in darkness and dissolving it; God has taken our nature with its pollution and is not himself defiled by this but cleanses it.6 The really important principle for soteriology, according to Gregory, is that in Christ there should be genuine freedom of the will,7 and that salvation should have been brought to man’s soul through the union of the human soul with deity in Christ.8 In his positive and non-polemical teaching, Gregory of Nyssa seeks to return to the historical evidence of the Gospels as the real ground for the belief that in Christ deity is ‘mixed with’ manhood. The manner of the Incarnation is an impenetrable mystery, like the ‘how’ of Creation; but the Gospels show that Christ both experienced the limitations proper to man and also transcended them and acted, within his human existence, with divine power.9 This power was conjoined with love, in such a way that it was precisely in the humiliation of the incarnate life that it was most wonder¬ fully manifested. Gregory has here, in his hands as it were, the material for constructing a much more satisfactory Christology than the aridly meta¬ physical arguments about the union of two real and actual universals, deity and humanity, in a single prosopon. Unfortunately he does not develop the thought that divine power is a power of love and that it is most fully demonstrated in self-giving. Rather, he works out the thought that the deity was concealed under a veil of manhood so as to deceive the devil and induce him to accept the humanity as a ransom for sinners and thus to find 1 Gr. Naz. 2 3

ep. ib.

or.

30.5.

101.7. 101.11.

4 Didym.

Ps. 70:23. Apoll. 23.

6 Gr. Nyss.

ib. 26. 7 ib. 458 ib. 559 or. catech. 6

11-13.

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himself caught, in the act of snatching a prey to which he had no right, on the fish-hook of deity.1 It should, however, be added in fairness that Gregory dwells more fully on other aspects of Christ’s saving work, especi¬ ally the healing and cleansing of man’s disease and corruption,2 and that the deception of the devil is itself remedial since in the end the devil, too, will be brought within the scope of the purifying and saving efficacy of the Incarnation.3 Gregory also lays emphasis on the fact that the presence of deity in human nature through the Incarnation is different, indeed, in mode, but nevertheless parallel to, its continual immanent presence in all things. God is ‘mingled’ with us inasmuch as he contains and sustains the entire natural order in himself; in the Incarnation he was ‘mixed’ with our nature in order that by this mixture with the divine it might be deified. Thus the union of God and man in Christ is related to the indwelling of the divine in everything, clothing itself with it and embracing it, and Christology is harmonized with Neoplatonist thought concerning the world soul.4 Gregory is anxious to safeguard the distinction of the divine and human natures. Each operates in its own sphere: human nature did not bring Lazarus to life, nor did the ‘impassible power’ weep for him. Yet because of the union of the natures both sets of experiences were common to each and can be predicated of either.5 For Gregory’s basic concern with soteriology it is essential to affirm both the completeness and the distinctness of Christ’s manhood and the absolute indivisibility of its union with God by which humanity is exalted and deified. Gregory of Nazianzus lays similar stress on the wholeness of the natures and their indissoluble union. The Logos forms for himself a complete mortal nature, an equivalent exchange for the whole man, Adam, who had died; the divine cannot directly unite with flesh, and the human soul and mind, as the image of God, constitutes an intermediary link through which, as being akin to itself, deity can consort with flesh so that what deifies and what is deified can become one God.6 This interesting revival of Origen’s speculations about the mediating role of the human soul in Christ was not developed further by Gregory. Although the assumption by the Logos of complete manhood is important in his anti-Apollinarian argument, he does not pursue its implications in his own Christology. For the most part he is content to affirm that the Logos is united inseparably with ‘the man’ whom he assumed for our salvation, so that Christ is at once passible in flesh and impassible in deity, earthly and heavenly, comprehensible and incompre¬ hensible. By this union, one and the same person being complete man and God, the whole man who fell under sin is re-created.7 Gregory recognizes two natures, God and man; but there are not two Sons or two Gods any more than the duality of a man’s soul and body implies that there are two men. The natures are distinct: they are ‘one thing and another thing’; b it 1

ib.

21-24.

* See below, p. 151. 8 4 6 0 7

or. catech. 24-29. ib. 24. Eun. 5 (PG, 45.705). Gr. Naz. carm. 1.10.54-61. ep. 101.

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there are not two distinct persons (‘one personal entity and another personal entity’).1 The union is ‘substantial’ (‘according to ousia’). Hence, to deny that Mary is ‘God-bearer’ (theotokos) is to deny Christ’s divinity.2 This title was intended to express a Christological rather than a Mariological truth. It was meant to assert that, although deity as such is impassible, the humanity which was properly the subject of the experience of human birth was totally appropriated by deity; Mary was not, therefore, the mother of a man indwelt by God, but of one who was personally and essentially God. It had been used, with no controversial intention, by Origen,3 and by the preNicene bishops of Alexandria, Peter and Alexander.4 5 It appears in the Greek text of Hippolytus’ treatise on the Blessing of Jacob f but is probably a later interpolation there. Eusebius used it frequently, as did Apollinarius and the Cappadocians. In the Nestorian controversy it was to become a focal point and touchstone of Christology. Apollinarianism was rejected by a council held under Damasus, bishop of Rome, in 377 and subsequent councils in the East. The Cappadocians had tried to maintain a Christology on the Alexandrian lines without excluding the human soul from the humanity assumed by the Logos, but the real alternative to the basic assumptions on which Apollinarius had proceeded towards his extreme solution of the problem was provided by the Antio¬ chene theologians who, in reaction against Apollinarianism, developed elements in the old tradition which had been exemplified by Eustathius. This reply to the Alexandrian Christology found expression in the work of Diodore, bishop of Tarsus, and his pupil, Theodore of Mopsuestia. Of the former’s writings (he died in about 394) little remains. It is clear, however, that he reacted sharply against the idea of deity and humanity being combined in one hypostasis.6 This would suggest to him that God and man were conflated so as to be neither one nor the other. Accordingly, he drew so clear-cut a distinction between the divine and the human in Christ that it tended to suggest a virtual separation of the two. Thus he interpreted the saying of Christ about blasphemy against the Son of Man on the one hand and against the Holy Spirit on the other as stating a contrast between blasphemy against the man (Jesus) and blasphemy against the deity who dwelt in the man as in a temple.7 The one is the son of David, the other the Son of God.8 In a similar fashion Diodore interprets Matt. 22!4iff. to mean that Christ as man is David’s son, whereas Christ as the Logos is David’s Lord. On the other hand, because David’s son is the temple of God the Logos, the title ‘Lord’, which belongs by nature to the Logos, is bestowed on David’s son by grace. ‘The one born of Mary is by nature David’s son, ib. 2 ib. cf. or. 43.38. 3 set. in Dt. 22:23; bom. y in Lc. 4 Peter of Alexandria, fr. (PG. 18.517); Alexander, ep. Alex. 5 Hipp. ben. Jac. 1. 6 Briere, Rev. de VOrient chrttien 30 (1946), fr. 26. 7 Abramowski, ZNTW. 42 (1949), fr. 20. 8 ib. fr. 42. 1

12.

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but by grace the son of God'.1 Hence, although Diodore holds that the ‘one worship’ on which Apollinarius laid so much emphasis implies blasphemy, since it presupposes that humanity and deity are one and the same in essence, he allows that ‘we worship the temple because of the one who dwells in it’.2 Thus in Diodore’s Christology the communicatio idiomatum is an interchange of honour, grace and worship, not of nature. The difficult question for this type of Christology is to define the uniqueness of the Incarnation. Diodore’s answer is that in Christ, unlike the prophets, the indwelling of the Logos was complete and permanent.3 Diodore’s terminology can at first sight give a misleading impression of his typically Antiochene attempt to start from the basic assumption of the duality of deity and manhood in Christ and to work towards a personal unity of the divine Son with the ‘assumed man’. This is because in speaking of the human nature his usage varies between ‘man’ and ‘flesh’. Indeed, ‘flesh’ is his more usual term for Christ’s humanity. The fact that he can equate ‘the flesh’ with ‘the man born of Mary’, ascribe the cry of dereliction on the Cross to the ‘flesh’, and state, in expounding Luke 2:52, that ‘the flesh’ increased in wisdom through the gradual impartation of wisdom to it by the Logos, shows clearly that he intends ‘flesh’ to be synonymous with ‘man’.4 5 Theodore of Mopsuestia, it may be observed, points out the com¬ prehensive range of meaning which ‘flesh’ can carry in the letters of Paul.6 A more impressive exposition of this line of thought was furnished by Theodore of Mopsuestia, enough of whose work survives to enable his polemical theology to be compared with his biblical commentaries and, in his Catechetical Homilies, his explanation of the Faith to candidates for baptism. He offers a radically different alternative to Apollinarianism. Whereas the Cappadocians had been content, on the whole, to point out the soteriological weakness involved in the denial of a rational soul in Christ, Theodore challenges the soteriological foundation of the whole Alexandrian theology. This was the principle that only the divine can deify, and therefore the flesh of Christ must be divine flesh: the flesh of God. Theodore substitutes a different principle: salvation is through participation in the humanity of Christ, which, it is essential to believe, was the same as our manhood and not, therefore, a human nature which, whether or not it be formally acknowledged as possessing a rational soul, was naturally and necessarily controlled and motivated by the Logos. This humanity of Christ was joined to deity and it is thereby glorified and deified, but it was the assumed and glorified human soul which was the scene of the defeat of the devil and the victory over sin. The idea of a genuinely human victory is central to Theodore’s Christology, and the soul of Christ is thus for him not merely a theological construction but a religious concept of primary importance. This means that he cannot ascribe the actions of Christ simply and directly to the Logos; the saving work of Christ in self-giving and in the frr. 21, 3, 30. orat. 3.25. Abramowski ft. 35ft. Briere frr. 12, 36ft. Thdr. Mops. Rom. 7:5.

1 Briere,

2 Sev. Ant. 3 4 5

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conquest of temptation is, throughout, an act of the human will. Hence Theodore thinks of the union of deity and humanity as a moral union consisting of total harmony of will, a union of mutual love, of the response of the human soul to the ‘good pleasure’ or ‘favour’ of God. The union is so complete that there is one person of Christ, not two. The one person, furthermore, is the person, or concrete presentation as an individual entity, of the conjoined divine and human natures. It is not, as in Alexandrian Christology, the one person of the Logos which has, in addition to its own ‘natural’ divine nature, assumed a human nature which has no person or hypostasis of its own, but is, simply, the human nature of the divine person. In his Catechetical Homilies Theodore declares that it was not merely a human body that was assumed, but a complete man of body and soul.1 It is the limitations of the human soul which bring about the weaknesses of human physical life; the flesh of God, according to the Apollinarian understanding of this, would not suffer weakness or defects, for these are not inherent in flesh as such. Hence God, the Logos, cannot be to Christ’s flesh what the rational soul is to the flesh of ordinary men. If that were so, Christ either did not suffer the ‘fleshy’ weaknesses which the Gospels tell us he suffered, or he pretended or appeared to do so.2 If, however, the human soul was the direct controlling principle of the human flesh, then the problem had to be faced concerning the natural liability of the human soul to sin. Apollinarius had secured the absolute immutability of Christ’s will by postulating as the seat of his will the Logos and not a rational soul. Theodore is equally clear that Christ was totally sinless, but he ascribes this to divine grace operating on the human soul and making it in fact immutable.3 Theodore naturally shows no hesitation in speaking of the humanity of Christ as the ‘man assumed’.4 He can therefore answer the crucial question, whether Mary is ‘man-bearer’ (anthropotokos) or ‘God-bearer’ (theotokos), with the reply: ‘both’. She is the former by nature and the latter by relation: that is, she is ‘man-bearer’ inasmuch as he who was born of her was man, and ‘God-bearer’ inasmuch as God was in the man who was born, not naturally (so as to be circumscribed) but according to the voluntarily assumed relationship. The question whether God or a man was crucified is answered along the same lines.5 So, too, with the embarrassing text, Lk. 2:52: there was a genuine advance of Jesus in wisdom as well as in stature, to a greater degree than was possible for any other men, because the Logos, foreseeing his future excellence, united himself with him from his conception and co-operated with his progress.6 This indwelling is illustrated, as we should expect, by the old simile of the temple.7 It is not an indwelling ‘according to substance’ (ousia), for this would mean either that God’s indwelling in Christ was no more than an instance of his universal presence, 1 2 3 4 5 8 7

catech. 5.19. ib. S.gfT. ib. 5.19. catech. 8.5, 13; inc. inc. 15. ib. 7. e.g., catech. 8.5.

7, 15.

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or else that God’s substantial presence was circumscribed and localized in Jesus Christ. Nor is it only an indwelling ‘according to good pleasure’ (eudokia), the good will of God towards those who respond to his gracious¬ ness. This is the mode in which God dwells in the saints. But in the case of Christ it is indwelling ‘as in a Son’. This means that it involves a union of the whole assumed man with the Logos, a preparation of the man by the Logos for full participation in the sonship which belongs to the Logos by nature, and a completeness and permanence of union which affects a single concrete presentation (prosopon) of the two who have been so united.1 For, although Theodore says that the form of God, the one who assumes, is God, while the form of a servant, the one who is assumed, is man,2 and distinguishes the ‘true’ Son who is Son by nature from the one who truly shares in the same Sonship by union with him, he disallows any talk of two Sons. One Son alone is to be acknowledged, and both the distinction of the natures and the unity of the prosopon are to be safeguarded.3 There must be neither confusion of natures nor division of the person.4 5 Just as a man and his wife are said to be one flesh, so we might say that ‘they are no longer two prosopa but one’, not thereby saying anything detrimental to the duality of the divine and human natures, each in itself perfect; each nature has in itself its own concrete subsistence and is an hypostasis, an entity with its own individual external presentation (prosopon); but there is one external presentation (prosopon) of the two conjoined.6 Much in Theodore’s Christology represents an advance towards a more satisfactory theory. It has the great merit of ascribing genuine soteriological significance to Christ’s manhood and of avoiding the Alexandrian necessity of explaining away much, including some of the most central and vitally important elements, in the Gospel narratives. It could not fail, however, to be condemned by theologians of the opposing school as deficient in respect of the unity of Christ’s person, and so also of the uniqueness of the Incarna¬ tion. Theodore’s biblical exegesis certainly lent colour to the charge of dividing the unity, for if the Alexandrians had difficulty in making the Logos the sole and unique subject of all that Christ experienced, Theodore found himself in the awkward situation of having to attribute some experi¬ ences and some words of Christ to the Logos and others to the ‘assumed man’. To Alexandrians a union ‘according to good pleasure’ was not enough to differentiate Jesus from a prophet or saint - though the fact that Theodore liked to speak of the union as a ‘conjunction’ (synapheia) could not properly be held against him (as it often has been) on the ground that it denotes a loose association rather than a union; on the contrary, Apollinarius uses the term himself (it can signify any degree of unity from association to fusion), while Theodore is perfectly content to make almost equal use of what has wrongly been regarded as the stronger term henosis. The controversy did not come to a head until the Antiochene theologian, 1 2 8 4 5

inc. 7. catech. 8.13. inc. 12. ib. 5. ib. 8.

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Nestorius, had succeeded to the patriarchate of Constantinople in 428, the year of Theodore’s death. It did so, not because the views of Nestorius differed in any significant respect from those of Theodore but because his ecclesiastical position gave them mass publicity and enabled his formidable opponent, Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria, to pursue his political aim of hounding Nestorius out of his see by denouncing him as a heretic. Cyril’s theological opposition to the Antiochene Christology was genuine; it is clearly expressed in biblical commentaries written before the controversy with Nestorius broke out. His refusal to make the slightest concession to Nestorius’ point of view or to try to understand what Nestorius wanted to say was motivated by inter-patriarchal rivalry rather than theological concern. His success in reaching agreement with the Antiochene leaders, once Nestorius had been removed, on a basis of mutual explanation and willingness to listen, is sufficient evidence of this. Like Theodore, Nestorius emphasized most clearly the distinction between the deity and the manhood. The Son of David and the Son of God are two distinct natures; and for Nestorius ‘nature’ (physis) stands for an objective reality with, of necessity, its own concrete presentation ad extra, its prosopon. This point, on which he does not differ from Theodore although he labours it much more, is made clear in his long defence of his position, the Book of Heracleides.1 Hence he explains that it was not God as such who was born or was buried in the grave, but since God was in the one who was assumed, the one assumed may be called God by virtue of his union with God who assumed him.2 The Logos, says Nestorius, was God, united with man and dwelling in him; and he tries to support this with a far-fetched exegesis of Mt. 2:13: the angel told Joseph to take the ‘child’ and his mother, not the ‘God’ and his mother.3 In his view the Nicene creed indicates the duality of natures. It expresses belief in ‘one Lord Jesus Christ’; ‘Christ’ signifies both natures, and the creed, by not saying ‘We believe in one God the Word’, safeguards the orthodox against the idea that the subject of the credal affirmations that he was crucified and buried is the deity.4 Any failure to maintain this duality, he believed, led to the mutable Logos of Arianism or the incompletely human Christ of Apollinarius. It also meant the denial of the truth concerning redemption, through failure to acknowledge that it was as authentic man that Christ experienced tempta¬ tion and suffering and won the victory.6 His fear of confusing the natures led Nestorius, like Theodore, to be very reluctant to allow Mary to be called theotokos. In his case, however, the protest was public and brusquely controversial, his follower Dorotheus of Marcianopolis anathematizing, in a service at which Nestorius was seated on his episcopal throne, any who used this term which was evidently becoming dear to popular piety, and Anastasius, a priest whom Nestorius had brought with him from Antioch, preaching against the practice on the 1 Nest. Her act. 304, 442. On the interpolations in this work see L. Abramowski, Untersuchungen zum Liber Heradidis (Louvain, 1963). 2 fr. C. 9 (Loots, Nestoriana). 8 fr. C. 11. 4 fr. C. 17. 5 Herad. 132ft.

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ground that Mary was a human being, and God cannot be born of a human being.1 Nestorius held that the term contradicted the ‘without mother’ of Heb. 7:3; Mary did not bear deity, for ‘that which is born of the flesh is flesh’, nor did a creature bear the uncreate or the creator; Mary bore a man who was the instrument of deity.2 If Mary is truly the mother, then the offspring is manhood, not deity (for no mother can bear what is not consubstantial with herself); if what was born was God the Word and not a human nature then Mary was not his mother.3 Nestorius would prefer to call Mary the ‘God-receiver’ (theodochos), reserving the description ‘Godbearer’ for the Father in respect of the generation of the Logos.4 He would, alternatively, approve of ‘Christ-bearer’ (Christotokos), since ‘Christ’ desig¬ nates the union of the two natures;5 and he would even be willing to concede the use of theotokos (which does in fact occur in the second of three homilies on the Temptations ascribed to him) on the understanding that it does not signify that deity was born of Mary but that the union of manhood with deity from the moment of Christ’s conception makes this title permissible by the ‘interchange of properties’.6 In any other sense than this, theotokos is heretical, recalling the errors of Arius, Eunomius and Apollinarius,7 and leaves the Christian bereft of argument against pagan ‘mothers of gods’.8 Nestorius also observes that the Nicene creed said nothing about Mary as ‘God-bearer’.9 Nestorius is as emphatic as Theodore that there is a true union of the two natures. If the human were not conjoined with the Logos, Christianity would be a cult of a human being. As it is, however, ‘we maintain the conjunction of natures without confusion; we acknowledge God in man, we reverence the man who, by reason of the conjunction with God is the object of joint adoration with God Almighty’.10 Christ is not mere man, but man and God together; hence, Nestorius says, ‘I separate the natures but I unite the worship’.11 There are not two Sons; the Logos was Son by nature from eternity, and the ‘form of a servant’ receives the status of Son by being assumed by the Logos.12 There are not, therefore, two persons but one who is, in respect of nature and not of status, twofold.13 The error of Paul of Samosata is to be repudiated, for he denied the complete and permanent ontic unity of Christ’s humanity with God.14 This union is not hypostatic or ‘natural’, but voluntary and personal. It is a union in one prosopon, for there is one concrete external presentation of the natures that are thus 1 Cyr. ep. 11; Socr. h.e. 7.32. 2 Nest. fr. C. 9. 3 fr. C. 8. 4 fr. C. 10. 5 fr. A. 6; C. xo. 6 fr. A. 7; cf. horn, in Matt. 4:6 (Nau, Nestorius, Livre d'HSraclide, p. 345). 7 ibfr. C. 10. 8 fr. C. 9. 9 fr. A. 1. 10 fr. C. 8. 11 fr. C. 9. 12 fr. C. 10. 13 fr. C. 12. ^ fr. C. 18; Heracl. 67ft.

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united, and this is Christ. The prosopon of deity conjoined with manhood is Christ; so that, although the prosopon of each nature remains separate from the other, there is, as it were, an over-arching prosopon (the concrete reality of Christ) which embraces both.1 Within the prosopon of union there is an interchange of properties (communicatio idiomatum) in the sense that the properties of either nature can equally be predicated of Christ, the single external presentation of the two.2 This interchange is involved in the "unifying of the worship’ on which Nestorius laid such emphasis; it does not imply that there is an actual exchange of attributes between deity and manhood. Cyril represents the opposite side of the Christological dispute. One might imagine Cyril and Nestorius contemplating the Christmas scene. Neither wishes to withold worship from the Christ-child: on the contrary, both reverence him as Son of God. Nestorius, however, insists that in doing this he must at the same time repudiate any idea that God has been born as a baby and that God is in a cradle: as he actually put it, ‘I deny that God is two months or three months old’.3 On the other hand, Cyril insists equally strongly that the baby in the cradle is God. By this, Cyril means that the one being, the person of the eternal Logos, is the subject of the human experience. It is as incarnate, or in human nature, that the Logos is born, suffers and undergoes the weaknesses of human life; but it is the same Logos who was previously discarnate, and none other, who experiences humanly. Cyril thus maintains the tradition of Athanasius and other Alexandrian theologians. The union of deity and humanity is a union in the person of the Logos and not in Nestorius’ ‘Christ’ who is the prosopon of the assumedman-conjoined-to-the-Logos. The latter theory seemed to Cyril to mean that Christ is an inspired man, not truly God but a man united to God and given divine status.4 Cyril’s basic principle of Christology is summed up in the Apollinarian phrase which he adopted, believing it to be Athanasian: ‘one incarnate nature of God the Word’.6 By ‘nature’ (physis) Cyril means virtually the same as ‘hypostasis’; there is one individual entity who became incarnate, and this is the Logos. Cyril does not follow Appollinarius in denying the completeness of the humanity; the Logos united to himself hypostatically flesh ‘ensouled with a rational soul’.6 The soteriological objection to Apollinarianism had settled this question. Cyril wants, rather, to affirm the belief which Apollinarius aimed at expressing, that the subject of the human experience is none other than the eternal Logos. He wants to do this without denying the completeness of the manhood and yet at the same time without opening the door in the slightest degree to the idea that the Incarnation means the indwelling of a man by the Logos. He does it by denying that the humanity, which is complete, has any independent existence. It is not a mere abstraction. On the contrary, it is a real (Platonic) universal, so that 1 Heracl. 212, 219. 2 ib. 289, 331, 343. 3 Cyr. ep. 23. 4 adv. Nest, proem. 5 ib.; ep. 40. 6 ep. Nest. 1; adv. Nest. 2 proem.

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on the lines of Cyril’s Christology it is right to say that Christ is ‘man’ but not ‘a man’, and that the humanity is ‘impersonal’ in the sense that it has no concrete subsistence of its own, but is hypostatized in the hypostasis of the Logos. After the ‘hypostatic’ or ‘natural’ union there is, as there has always been from eternity, the Logos who is by nature God; there is no one other than the self-same divine Logos who is now also by nature man. The human nature subsists only in the hypostasis of the divine Logos; it has no hypostatic existence by itself.1 The Logos was and is always in ‘the form of God’, but over and above this he took the ‘form of a servant’ which he did not previously possess.2 This is why Cyril finds the name ‘Emmanuel’ peculiarly significant for Christology and constantly uses it in order to show that the historical figure of the Gospels is none other than ‘God with us’. Mary is therefore ‘God-bearer’ because the humanity born of her is humanity hypostatically united with deity from conception; and the Antiochenes are wrong in worshipping the manhood along with the deity: there is but one undivided worship of Emmanuel.3 There is, too, an actual, and not merely conceptual, interchange of properties, the flesh receiving the glory of the Logos and the Logos making the experiences of the flesh his own.4 This principle was obviously important for Cyril’s soteriology. The work of Christ must be the work of God incarnate,5 and the flesh of Christ must be flesh which God has made his own, or, rather, it must actually be God’s flesh, to which the life-giving energy of God has been imparted like coals energized by fire. Otherwise, says Cyril, the eucharistic body would be a man’s and not God’s, and (reversing Nestorius’ contention that Christ spoke of eating the flesh of the Son of Man, not of God) those who supposed Christ to be talking about the literal and cannibalistic eating of a man’s flesh would have been right.6 Cyril does not deny the duality of the divine and the human. Christ is ‘from two’, and the two are distinct ‘objects’.7 In the union the two are neither confused nor changed,8 but the union, so far from being a con¬ junction ‘according to good pleasure’, is like the union of soul and body in man or the union of fire and coal in a red-hot lump.9 The distinction of natures is thus always theoretical, for they are in fact indivisible, though Cyril comes close to making an exception to this at the crucial point of the suffering of Christ. The Logos, he says, ‘suffered impassibly’, or ‘was impassible in the suffering body’.10 On the analogy of the fire and coal it could be said that the fire is not itself affected if the red-hot coal is poked, even though the constituent elements in the lump are only theoretically distinguishable. On the analogy of soul and body it could be said that the 1 2 8 4 6 * 7 8 9 10

apol. Thdt. (PG. 76.401); ep. Nest. 3. adv. Nest. 5.2. ib. 2.10. inc. unigen. (PG. 75.1241). adv. Nest. 3.2; 4.4. ib. 4-5ep. 45; apol. Thdt. (PG. 76.396). ep. 45, 46; quod un. Chr. (PG. 75. 1292). adv. Nest. 2 proem.; schol. inc. 9; ep. 46. ep. 45; adv. Nest. 5.4.

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former is not directly affected in itself by a physical blow. But the weakness of the Christological tradition of Athanasius, and Alexandria generally, becomes apparent again in Cyril at this point; the presuppositions, that the subject of the Gospel record is the Logos and that deity is impassible, can be reconciled only by ascribing suffering exclusively to the flesh. Hence Cyril’s treatment of Gethsemane and the Temptations is inadequate. Cyril established his case against Nestorius by letters which secured the support of Celestine, bishop of Rome, and treatises which gained him the backing of Theodosius II and the imperial family. After a synod at Rome at which Celestine condemned the teaching of Nestorius, Cyril sent his third letter to Nestorius containing anathemas which he was to accept. These assert Cyril’s doctrine in its most polemical form. Mary is God-bearer because she bore in a fleshly manner the Word of God made flesh. The Logos was united with flesh hypostatically, and with his flesh is one Christ, the same God and man. After the union the hypostases (for Cyril, as was stated above, the terms hypostasis and nature are virtually synonymous and interchangeable) are not to be divided on the supposition that there is a conjunction between them in respect of status or authority or power and not, rather, a coming together in a natural union. The statements made about Christ in Scripture are not to be apportioned between two persons (prosopa) or hypostases and assigned to a man conceived of apart from the Logos, or vice versa, respectively. There is no question of Christ being an inspired man and not truly God the Logos who is Son by nature and who became flesh; nor is the Logos the God or master of Christ, but rather one and the same who is God and man. Nor, again, is Jesus a man energized by the Word and thereby glorified, as though he were distinct from the Logos. The joint worship of the ‘assumed man’ with the Logos is condemned, as is the idea that Christ was glorified and empowered by the Spirit as by a power which was alien to himself and not his own Spirit; and it is the Logos incarnate who is our high priest, and not a man separate from the Logos, his sacrifice being entirely for our sake and not for himself. So, too, his flesh is life-giving as being the flesh of the Logos who gives life universally. The last of the twelve anathemas condemns any denial that the Logos suffered in flesh and rose from the dead as being himself life and, as God, life-giving.1 This was the Christology endorsed by the Council of Ephesus of 431, the Third Ecumenical Council, although the anathemas themselves, which were read to the council, did not receive, like Cyril’s second letter to Nestorius, formal recognition as an authoritative document of the Faith. This assembly, which condemned Nestorius in his absence, was a small body of Cyril's supporters and the representatives of Celestine of Rome. The bishops of the Antiochene party, led by John of Antioch, arrived late and held a separate council which repudiated the anathemas and ineffectively deposed Cyril. The views of this group are best represented by the writings of Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, against whose attack upon his position Cyril wrote an extended defence of the anathemas. Theodoret follows the traditional Antiochene line of thought. He strongly emphasizes the dis¬ tinction of the natures, the one which assumed and the other which was 1

ep. Nest.

3.

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assumed, and objects to the confusion between them suggested by Cyril’s theory of a real interchange of properties.1 He preferred to call Mary both ‘man-bearer’ and ‘God-bearer’, not employing the one term without the other, but he was prepared to accept the latter title in the sense, not that God was born in his own nature but that Mary bore the man who was united to God who created hirn.2 Theodoret wished, too, for the sake of soteriology, to lay stress on the human activity of the assumed man.3 He followed the Antiochene tradition in seeking to safeguard the voluntary character of the union and to understand it in terms of divine initiative and human response, and hence he found difficulty in Cyril’s ‘hypostatic’ and ‘natural’ union.4 On the other hand, he strongly asserted the union of the natures in a single prosopon, which he came to identify with hypostasis and to envisage as the actual concrete being, the Logos, rather than, in Nestorius' manner, as a prosopon of united prosopa.5 Theodoret's view was expressed in an official letter, which he probably composed, from John of Antioch’s council at Ephesus to the emperor in August, 431. This states that Christ is perfect God and perfect man, of rational soul and body, begotten before the ages in respect of deity and the same born of Mary in respect of manhood, consubstantial with the Father in respect of deity and consubstantial with us in respect of manhood. ‘For a union of two natures took place; wherefore we acknowledge one Christ, one Son, one Lord. According to this conception of the unconfused union we acknowledge the Holy Virgin as God-bearer, because God the Word became flesh and was made man and from his actual conception united with himself the temple which he took from her.’ The New Testament statements about Christ may be applied either indiscriminately to the one person (prosopon) or else separately to the divinity and humanity respectively in view of the duality of natures. After Cyril, in a letter to Acacius, bishop of Beroea, had somewhat modified his more extreme statements, at least to the extent of explaining that he intended no confusion of deity and humanity,6 this Antiochene document became in substance the basis of agreement between Cyril and the party of John of Antioch and Theodoret. This had become possible through the deposition and subsequent exile of Nestorius, and through Cyril’s willingness, once that objective had been gained, to explain his position and interpret the substance of the anathemas less offensively. Accepted by Cyril and John in correspondence between each other,7 this document is generally known as the Formula of Union of 433. It marks a great step forward in the long controversy. Terminology was improved, and the precision given to ‘person’ and ‘nature’ helped to dispel the apprehensions caused by Cyril’s formula of ‘one nature incarnate’. The duality of natures was maintained, but it was balanced by strong emphasis 1 2 3 4 5 8 7

Thdt. eran. 2; reprehens, anath. 4. ep. 151; inc. 35; Cyr. apol. Thdt. 1. inc. 20. reprehens, anath, 3. eran. 3; ep. 145. Cyr. ep. 33. Cyr. epp. 38, 39 (Hahn, p. 215).

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on the fact that it was ‘the same’ eternal Logos who was born of Mary. Thus the chief tenets of Antioch (the distinctness of deity and humanity) and Alexandria (the Logos as the personal subject of the human experience) were alike secured. The term theotokos was formally approved, in a sense in which it would create no difficulty for Antiochene Christology. The double homoousion anticipated the definition of Chalcedon. The formula of 433 and the reaction to it offer in fact a preview of what was to happen at Chalcedon and afterwards. Like the definition of 451, the formula appears to satisfy the principal theological concerns of both sides; like it, however, it soon ran into opposition. This came from both wings, but, as might be expected from its Antiochene provenance, the formula was attacked most bitterly by the upholders of Cyril’s Christology in its most intransigent form. This renewed opposition was expressed moderately by Proclus, the new patriarch of Constantinople, in the Tome in which, in 435, he briefed the Armenian Christians on the current situation, attacking the Antiochene position as this had been propounded by Theodore of Mopsuestia. It was stirred up in a much more extreme form by Dioscorus, who succeeded Cyril at Alexandria in 444 and regarded any retreat from the formula of ‘one nature’ as a betrayal of the Alexandrian tradition of orthodoxy. Theodoret had to complain to Dioscorus in 447 that he had been misrepresented by disaffected visitors to Alexandria, apparently coming from Antioch, as teaching a division of Christ into two Sons; but as the only witnesses to his orthodoxy whom he cited were successive bishops of Antioch including John’s successor, Domnus, who was shortly to be deposed by the party of Dioscorus, the Alexandrian patriarch was unim¬ pressed.1 In his dialogue, Eranistes (Collector), Theodoret attacks a ‘one nature’ Christology which involved the notion that the human nature had been absorbed into the divine and, though not absolutely abolished, merged in the essence of deity.2 This represents, in all probability, the view of Eutyches, the head of a monastery near Constantinople, who was accused by Eusebius of Dorylaeum before a local council presided over by Proclus’ successor, Flavian, in 448, the charge being heresy of the Apollinarian type. Eutyches’ actual views are somewhat obscure. His statements tended to be ambiguous and he was inclined to modify or retract them under pressure. It is, however, fairly clear that he denied two natures in Christ and affirmed one nature of God incarnate and made man.3 ‘Nature’ seems to be used here in its Cyrillme sense, for Eutyches was willing to acknowledge that Christ was God and man (‘He who is eternally perfect God, the same was also made perfect man for our salvation’);4 and he even agreed that Christ is ‘of two natures’ in the sense that deity and manhood can be theoretically dis¬ tinguished as the constituent elements, as it were, though after the union there is but one ‘nature’ in the sense of a single concrete entity.5 Leo of Rome pours scorn on this idea: it is as foolish to affirm two natures before 1 Thdt. 2

eran.

ep.

83.

proem;

ib. 2.

3 Council of Constantinople, 448 (Schwartz, 4 Eutyches 5 Leo

tom.

ep. Leon. 6.

(Hahn, p. 319).

Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum

2.1, p. 159.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

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the union (when the Logos subsisted in the divine nature only) as to deny two natures after the union (when, ex hypothesi, the divine nature had taken humanity into union with itself); but he does so by taking Eutyches’ statement literally and naively, whereas Eutyches probably jneant by ‘acknowledging Christ to be of two natures before the union’ much the same as Cyril meant by saying that the natures could be distinguished, though only conceptually. Worse in the opinion of his critics was his statement that the flesh of Christ is not consubstantial with ours, though when pressed on this point he was prepared to concede it - reluctantly, however, because he held that since the flesh is the flesh of the Logos it can scarcely be said to be a man’s flesh, which is what ‘consubstantial with ours’ would seem to imply.1 He was suspected, almost inevitably, of suggesting that the flesh of Christ was ‘from heaven', but, like Apollinarius and for the same reason, had no difficulty in denying any such belief.2 Leo evidently thought that the views of Eutyches amounted to an unsophisticated docetism. In fact, however, they look like the Christology of Cyril in his most uncompromising mood pushed to extreme lengths. This was certainly how they appeared to Dioscorus. Eutyches was condemned by Flavian’s council which also adopted a profession of faith subsequently embodied in a letter from Flavian to the emperor Theodosius. This largely repeats the Formula of Union, but continues with further explanations. It acknowledges Christ ‘from two natures’ (this being probably the authentic text rather than ‘in two natures’) ‘after the incarnation, in one hypostasis and one prosopon, one Christ, one Son, one Lord’. In the sense that Christ is one and the same, though of the two natures, this document does not quarrel with the formula ‘one incarnate and “made human’’ nature of God the Word’, and thus upholds the legitimacy of Cyril’s position; at the same time it anathematizes those who affirm two Sons or two hypostases or two prosopa, and names Nestorius as one of these heretics.3 This credal statement is important for the further clarification that it brought to terminology. The unity of Christ’s person is now defined in terms of one hypostasis or prosopon, the two being synonymous and meaning ‘concrete individual being’ or ‘person’; and Cyril’s ‘one nature’ is allowed because it is defined as meaning the same, in effect, as ‘one hypostasis or prosopon’. ‘Hypostasis’ thus ceased to be used for the ‘natures’ in the strict sense, i.e. the humanity and the deity of Christ; hence, even though Cyril had spoken of two hypostases, meaning natures, this usage, with all the confusion that it entails, is now ruled out. After his condemnation Eutyches protested his orthodoxy to Leo, bishop of Rome, but Flavian informed Leo at length concerning his own, and his council’s, view of the matter, and Leo was not disposed to listen to Eutyches. Instead, he wrote a reply to Flavian, the Tome ([dogmatic] treatise), which was intended to be communicated to the council which Dioscorus and Eutyches persuaded the emperor Theodosius to summon at Ephesus in 449. This council was controlled by Dioscorus, who refused to 1 cf. Council of Constantinople (448) (A.C.0. 2.1, p. 142). 2 Eutych. ep. Leon. 3 Flavian ep. Thds. (Hahn, p. 320).

14°

A History of Christian Doctrine

allow Leo’s envoys to read the Tome. Eutyches was reinstated, Flavian deposed (and physically assaulted, so that he died soon afterwards), and the Antiochene leaders also deposed, including Theodoret from Cyrrhus and Domnus from Antioch. This council, described by Leo as latrocinium (‘robber-synod’ or ‘brigandage’),1 set up the decisions of Ephesus, 431, without the formula of 433, as the standard of orthodoxy against the line taken by Rome. Rome’s position, as set out in Leo’s Tome, contributed to the dispute little, if anything, new. It is a reaffirmation of traditional Western Christology as originally worked out by Tertullian, and Leo borrows some of his most significant passages from previous Western writers, Tertullian and Gaudentius of Brescia. The Tome asserts the doctrine of the one person and the two natures. It was ‘the same’ only-begotten eternal Son who was born of Mary, and the birth in time neither diminishes from nor adds to the eternal generation.2 The distinctive character of each nature remained un¬ impaired, and, coming together in one person, an inviolable nature w-as united to a passible nature, so that one and the same Jesus Christ was capable of death in the one nature and incapable of death in the other. In the whole and perfect nature of true humanity true God was born, complete in what belonged to him, complete in what belonged to us.3 The Son of God descending from heaven and yet not leaving the glory of the Father, was born miraculously; but the miracle does not mean that his human nature is unlike ours. God is not changed, nor is manhood absorbed. Each ‘form’ operates what is proper to it in communion with the other, the Word performing what belongs to the Word and the flesh what pertains to the flesh.4 Thus it is proper to the human nature to weep for Lazarus and to the divine to raise him from the dead. But, having so strongly emphasized the distinction of natures as to ascribe different sayings of Jesus to each T and the Father are one’ to the divinity and ‘My Father is greater than I’ to the humanity - Leo abruptly applies the (conceptual) interchange of properties in order to maintain the unity of the one person. We can say that it was the Son of Man who came down from heaven and that it was the Son of God who was crucified and buried.5 Leo thus restates, rather in the mariner of the formula of 433, the chief principles to be upheld: the eternal Son as the subject of the human experiences and the duality of the divine and human natures; but he lays such stress on the latter as justly to alarm those who followed the Alexandrian approach. If he does not, as they suspected, divide the one Christ despite all his assurances concerning the identity of the Gospel figure with the eternal Son, he can fairly be accused of splitting the personality. Although he maintains the personal unity by means of the artificial device of the interchange of properties in Christological discourse, his ideas, derived from Tertullian, that each nature operates in its own sphere, albeit with the concurrence of the other, so that 1 2 3 4 5

Leo ep. 95. tom. 2. ib. 3. ib. 4. ib. 4, 5-

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

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Christ acts now divinely and now humanly, suggests the throwing of a switch and the turning on of one nature and turning off of the other. The first opportunity to decide the conflict between Leo and Dioscorus came with the death of the latter’s sympathizer, Theodosius II, in 450. Marcian, the new emperor, supported the other side and acceded to the requests of Leo and Theodoret for a council, which met at Chalcedon in 451. This, the Fourth Ecumenical Council, reaffirmed the creeds of Nicaea and ‘Constantinople’ (see above p. 115) and the authoritative character, as statements of the Faith against Nestorius and Eutyches respectively, of Cyril’s second and third letters to Nestorius and Leo’s Tome. It added a further Christological definition, closely resembling the formula of 433, Flavian’s statement of 448 and, in substance, Leo’s Tome. This Definition acknowledges ‘Christ as one and the same Son, the same perfect in deity, the same perfect in humanity, truly God and truly man, the same consisting of a rational soul and a body, consubstantial with the Father in respect of deity, the same consubstantial with us in respect of humanity, like us in all things save sin; begotten of the Father before the ages in respect of the deity, the same . . . born of the Virgin Mary the Godbearer in respect of the humanity, one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in’ (or possibly ‘from’, though it is likely that ‘from’ may have been amended at the Council to ‘in’) ‘two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way abolished because of the union, but the characteristic property of each nature being preserved and concur¬ ring into one prosopon and hypostasis, not as though Christ were separated or divided into two persons, but one a,nd the same Son and only-begotten God, Word, Lord, Jesus Christ’.1 Granted the presupposition with which the Council operated, that the basic Christian belief in the divinity of Christ must be expressed theo¬ logically in terms of one and the same entity, God the Logos, coming down from heaven and assuming human nature, Chalcedon offered as satisfactory a formulation as was possible. The presupposition had been established by the whole trend of Christological thinking during the previous centuries and above all by the Alexandrian theology. Chalcedon succeeded in combining with this the Antiochene principle that the humanity is real, distinct, and identical with the manhood of Adam, thus safeguarding the truth of man’s salvation. The Antiochene and Western tone of the Definition was clear enough. Nestorius was able to greet Leo’s Tome as an irreproachable statement of the Faith,2 and although an imperial edict early in 452 optimistically declared that the Council had finally closed the controversy the situation was not unlike that which prevailed after Nicaea: a credal statement had been adopted which commanded the powerful support of Rome and the West and was enforceable through imperial sanctions, but which failed to allay Eastern misgivings. Dioscorus had been deposed, but devotion to the actual language as well as the essential doctrine of Cyril continued to be 1 Symb. Chalc. (Hahn, pp. 166-7). 2 Nest. Heracl. 298.

J42

A History of Christian Doctrine

extremely strong, especially in Egypt (as the murder of Dioscorus’ Chalcedonian successor, Proterius, showed), and despite Leo's explanations of the dualistic passages in the Tome, especially the assurance that all Christ's actions, whether naturally human or divine, are to be referred to a single personal subject,1 it was widely supposed that Chalcedon had in effect repudiated Cyril and his achievement at Ephesus in 431. The long struggle between different parties after Nicaea was therefore paralleled by a see-saw contest between Chalcedonians and various kinds of monophysites in most of the Eastern sees, apart from Constantinople, between 452 and the death in 578 of Jacob Baradaeus, bishop of Edessa, who organized independent schismatic (Jacobite) churches under their own leaders. During the earlier part of this period the main stream of monophysite thought is represented by Egyptian leaders such as Timothy Aelurus, the successor of Proterius at Alexandria, who, after deposition and restoration, instigated the publication in 476 of the ‘Encyclical' of the usurping emperor Basiliscus which reversed the hitherto pro-Chalcedonian policy of the secular authority. This theology is virtually that of Cyril with very little modification, and the battle-ground for the struggle between its supporters and the Chalcedonians was less theological than political. The question was whether Chalcedon and its associated statements of faith were or were not to be regarded as having binding authority. Basiliscus’ Encyclical rejected Chalcedon and Leo’s Tome as having ‘disturbed the unity and order of the holy churches’.2 In line with this ultra-Cyrilline Christology was the addition, ascribed to Peter Fullo, patriarch of Antioch, twice deposed and restored between 470 and 488, of the words ‘who was crucified for us’ to the Trisagion hymn: ‘Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal’.3 This caused much offence because the threefold ‘Holy’ was referred at Constantinople to the Trinity and not, as Peter Fullo intended, to Christ alone. More important was the attempt by the emperor Zeno, at the prompting of Acacius, patriarch of Constantinople, in 482, to reconcile the Egyptian church. Zeno’s Henotikon (‘unifying instrument') shows the growing tendency to explain away or whittle away the Chalcedonian formulation in order to conciliate those in the Cyrilline tradition. It anathematizes Eutyches as well as Nestorius, but it receives Cyril’s twelve anathemas as authoritative, ascribes both the miracles and the sufferings of Christ to a single person, and denies that the birth from Mary produced another Son besides the Logos, which would have meant an expansion of Trinity into quaternity. It anathematizes those who have ever expressed contrary opinions ‘whether at Chalcedon or at any other synod whatever’.4 This attempt at a rather weak compromise led to the thirty-five years ‘Acacian schism’ between Constantinople and Rome but did not heal the Eastern divisions. The principal theologian among the monophysites of the sixth century was Severus, patriarch of Antioch from 512 to his deposition on the acces1 2 8 4

Leo ep. 124. Evagrius h.e. 3.4. Theodore Lector h.e. 1.20; cf. Evagrius h.e. 3.44. Evagr. h.e. 3.14.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

143

sion of the Chalcedonian emperor Justin in 518. His Christology was prac¬ tically no more than a repetition of Cyril’s, and it is thus monophysite in phraseology rather than in substance. It is an interesting example of the extent to which the ‘monophysite’ - ‘Chalcedonian’ struggle was really only a sham fight so far as theology was concerned. It was a bitter and often murderous conflict, but the reality of it was political and cultural, not theological. Severus and others were content to man the entrenched positions that had been occupied in 431 without attempting to break out of them and advance. He is himself devoted to the old terminology with all its ambiguities. For him ‘hypostasis’ and ‘nature’, and indeed ‘person’, all mean a concrete individual entity. So in Christ there is one nature: ‘out of two’, certainly, but two natures united hypostatically are one nature.1 There is no confusion of deity and humanity. In Christ there is not one ousia but two, brought together in a synthesis, by which is meant a union which is neither a conjunction of separate objects nor a fusion but a union in which the one element is dependent for its existence on the other.2 When pressed, Severus is in fact ready to admit two natures, but, like Cyril, he insists that they can be distinguished only theoretically.3 Unlike Eutyches, Severus has no hesitation in affirming the double consubstantiality of Christ’s deity with God and of his humanity with ourselves. Where Severus did make a distinct contribution was in his insistence, against Leo’s theory that each nature operates what is proper to it, that since the incarnate Logos is the subject of all activities, divine and human, there is one operation only; this is characterized as one divine/human operation or ‘theandric energy’.4 The accession of Justinian brought the reconciliation of Constantinople with Rome on the basis of Chalcedon, but much effort was devoted to inter¬ preting and glossing Chalcedon in a Cyrilline sense to win over those who, like Severus, would recognize nothing but the ‘one incarnate nature of God the Word’. Justinian succeeded in getting agreement with both Rome and the Severans to a condemnation of any who denied that ‘Jesus Christ . . . who was crucified is one of the holy and consubstantial Trinity’.5 Meanwhile a more thorough attempt had been made to explain the two sides to each other. The work of Leontius, a monk of Constantinople known as Leontius of Byzantium, and his namesake of Jerusalem who seems to have worked at about the same time (the former died in or about 543), served to clarify the terminology further and to add a finishing touch to the Cyrilline Christology while seeking to demonstrate that Ephesus and Chalcedon had not contradicted one another. Working on the basis of the Aristotelian categories, Leontius of Byzantium defined the terms ousia, nature, hypostasis, and so on. He pointed out that an hypostasis is a species or nature individuated; it is an independently subsisting entity. There cannot actually be an ‘anhypostatic’ nature, that is, a nature which is not 1 2 * 4 5

Anastasius Sinaita hod. (PG. 89.148, 304). Leontius of Jerusalem monoph. (PG. 86. 1848). Eustathius Monachus ep. (PG. 86.908, 921, 936). ib. (PG. 86.924-5); Diekamp, Doctrina Patrum, p. 309!. Codex Justiniani 1.1.6.

M4

A History of Christian Doctrine

individuated so as to be, concretely, the nature of a particular object.1 2 An anhypostatized nature would be an abstraction, and for this reason Leontius disliked Severus’ insistence that the natures of Christ have a distinct existence only in theory.3 The human nature of Christ is not a mere abstraction, a nature anhypostatized. Nor is it an hypostasis, for it has no independent existence; it does not subsist in, or as, a human hypostasis. It is, rather, anhypostatized. It has its hypostasis in the Logos; the human nature is individuated as the nature, not of a human being but of the Logos.3 This development in terminology served to clarify Cyril’s meaning; it states what is meant by the ‘impersonal’ humanity of Christ. It also helped to show, on the one hand, that a duality of natures need not entail a duality of persons, and, on the other, that to accept the single hypostasis does not necessitate speaking of one nature. Leontius upholds the Chalcedonian formula and speaks of two natures in one person or hypostasis, but, pro¬ vided that the sense in which the terms are used is properly understood, he does not disallow the ‘one incarnate nature of the Word’ nor ‘natural union’.4 Part of the policy of reconciling Severan monophysites to the Chal¬ cedonian definition was the repudiation of the ‘Three Chapters’, the person and writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, the writings of Theodoret on the controversy between Cyril and the Antiochenes, and the letter of Ibas, bishop of Edessa, to the Persian bishop Maris, on the same subject, written in or about 433. This was virtually to reverse the verdict of Chalcedon in favour of that of Dioscorus’ ‘Robber-Synod’, and, despite a condemnation of the ‘Three Chapters’ contained in Justinian’s Confession of Faith issued in 551, the assent to this of the West, represented by Pope Vigilius, was only obtained with great difficulty after a general council at Constantinople in 553 (the Fifth Ecumenical Council) had pronounced against them. The Council also repeated in substance anathemas which had been attached to Justinian’s confession. These sum up the contemporary Christological orthodoxy, asserting the hypostatic or ‘synthetic’ union and allowing the phrases, ‘from two natures’ (as well as ‘in two natures’) and ‘one incarnate nature’ provided these are recognized as asserting unity of person and not confusion of natures or essences.5 None of these essays in restatement succeeded in unifying the Church. A more determined effort was made in the following century. This was the adoption by Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople, and the emperor Heraclius of Severus’ theory of one operation in Christ. This meant that even though the two natures may be distinguished in theory there is but one divinehuman activity. This implies one will, and although it was only during the course of the controversy that attention came to be focussed specifically on the question of one or two wills the teaching of Sergius and his supporters is known as ‘Monothelitism’, the doctrine of a single will. A reunion was 1 2 3 4 5

Leontius of Byzantium, Nest, et Eut. (PG. 86.1280-1). arg. Sev. (PG. 86.19291L). ib. (1944); Nest, et Eut. (1277). id. cap. Sev. (1905); arg. Sev. (1929). Hahn, pp. i68ff.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

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achieved in 633 in Egypt between Cyrus, appointed patriarch of Alexandria by Heraclius with this object in view, and Severan monophysites. The formula of agreement was a statement of the usual Cyrilline Christology in an extreme and uncompromising form (for instance, glossing theotokos by ‘conceiving and bearing God the Word made flesh’) with a declaration that ‘the same one Christ and Son operates the activities which befit God and the human activities in one “theandric operation” ’, for which phrase ‘Dionysius the Areopagite’ is given the credit (Severus having probably derived it from him).1 Monothelitism was opposed by Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, in a long synodical letter sent to Honorius of Rome as well as to Sergius and others.2 He reasserts Leo’s view that each nature operates what is proper to it, and argues that since a nature is distinguishable only by its operation the assertion of one operation must lead to confusion of the natures. The ‘one theandric operation’ is implausibly explained as referring only to activity which simultaneously involved both natures. There are two operations, but one person is the operating subject of both. A much fuller defence of the duality of operations and of wills was worked out by Maximus the Confessor. His main point is that ‘operation’ belongs to a nature and not to a person. If this were not so, three distinct operations, including wills, would have to be ascribed to God who is three persons.3 The one ‘theandric operation’ is explained either on Sophronius’ lines or as expres¬ sing the interchange of properties and the mutual interpenetration of the natures in their operations.4 There are two wills, for in Christ there is the ‘natural will’ belonging to deity and the ‘natural will’ belonging to humanity; Christ does not share the deliberate or purposive will of ordinary men, for this rationally calculating, as opposed to intuitive, will is inherently bound up with ignorance and sin.5 There are thus two wills, but in no sense a split personality, for the union of natures implies that the deified human will is always freely in perfect agreement with the divine.6 The ‘Ecthesis’ (Exposition), a document drawn up by Sergius and issued by the emperor in 638, obtained general support for a time, including that of Pope Honorius. It asserts one personal subject of both the divine and the human acts, but deprecates the affirmation of either one or two operations, for fear of either monophysitism or else a division of the one person which would be worse than Nestorianism (for though Nestorius postulated two Sons he never asserted two wills). It affirms one will in the sense that the ‘rationally ensouled flesh’ of Christ never acted independently of, and in opposition to, the dictates of the Logos.7 This moderate statement was soon rejected by the West which remained loyal to Chalcedonian Christology and reaffirmed it at Pope Martin’s Lateran Council of 649 which even rejected the somewhat desperate attempt of the emperor Constans II in 1 ib. p. 338L 2 PG. 87.3148!!.; Hahn, pp. 340!!.

3 Max. ep. Anast. (PG. 90.152); Pyrr. (PG. 91.289). 4 schol. epp. Dion. Ar. (PG. 4.530!!.); opusc. (PG. 91.100); Pyrr (PG. 91.289). 5 Pyrr. (308). 6 opusc. (PG. 91.30!!.). 7 Hahn, p. 343!.

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648 to settle the controversy by repealing the Ecthesis and issuing, in the Typus (Decree), a declaration that discussion of the will or wills of Christ should cease. Changes in the political situation enabled a Chalcedonian reaction to take place in the East which resulted in the reaffirmation of the Chalcedonian formula by the Council of Constantinople of 681, the Sixth Ecumenical Council. A further clause was added which affirmed two natural operations and wills, without separation, change, division or confusion, the two natural wills not being mutually opposed but the human will being subject to the divine.1 The Cyrilline-Severan doctrine was by no means the only form which monophysitism took after Chalcedon. This was a genuine attempt to main¬ tain the Christology of Ephesus without the concessions that Leo and Chalcedon seemed to have made towards the position of Theodore and Nestorius; but other kinds of monophysite speculation tried in various ways to suggest that in the Incarnation human nature had been virtually absorbed into the divine. They may be called extreme types of Eutychianism. Among these were the idea of Julian of Halicarnassus, who was opposed by Severus, that because of the hypostatic union Christ’s body had been removed from the sphere of physical laws and exempted both from all suffering except that which the Word willed to endure, working a miracle to make this possible, and also from all possibility of corruption.2 This theory, known as ‘Aphthartodocetism’, rests on an extension of the traditional argument used against Arianism: that only a fully divine Christ can save mankind. Corruptible flesh can be raised to incorruptibility only by a Saviour who is absolutely without the possibility of corruption. This is a striking instance of the real weakness of that whole argument as it had been used against Paul of Samosata or Arius. Another type of monophysit¬ ism was the flat denial Of any distinction of natures after the union, as in the teaching of Niobe of Alexandria. These variations are of no great importance, though they represent a line of thought which exercised some influence on the Iconoclastic movement in the eighth century. The fierceness and the long duration of the iconoclastic controversy were due more to political than to theological reasons. It was a struggle between the emperor and the army on one side and conservative nobles on the other, and between bishops and monks. There were, however, certain Christological implications in the dispute. A very ancient line of Christian tradition, looking back to the Second Commandment and the biblical hatred of idolatry, strongly disapproved of the use of images, especially representations of God and Christ; the true image of God is Christ the Logos; the presence of the saints is portrayed spiritually, not physically, in their writings and in their virtues.3 On the other hand, the use and veneration of images of Christ, his Mother and the saints developed rapidly, especially from the late fourth century onwards, alongside the earlier practice of depicting Christian themes by 1 ib. pp. 172ft. 2 Leont. Byz. Nest, et Eut. (PG. 86.1329k.). 3 e.g., Clem. prot. 4.62, str. 7.5; Acts of John 27; Epiph. ep. {PG. 43.390!.); Or. Cels. 8.17; Chrys. hom. in Ps. 145:2; Theodotus of Ancyra cited at the Second Council of Nicaea (787) act. 6.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

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means of symbols and Old Testament types. In place of the Hebrew prophets’ view that the veneration of a religious image was nothing more than the worship of wood or stone, Christians generally came to share the attitude of the emperor Julian: ‘We do not say that the statues of the emperors are mere wood and stone and bronze, nor that they are the emperors themselves, but that they are images of the emperors. He there¬ fore who loves the emperor delights to see the emperor’s statue.'1 Christians felt the same delight in seeing Christ and the saints portrayed, though there continued to be agreement that no image can be made of the incor¬ poreal, invisible and infinite deity itself.2 The attack launched by the emperor Leo III in the years following 726 against images of Christ in human form, as opposed to Christological symbols such as the lamb,3 and images of Mary, the saints and angels, culminated in the decisions of the iconoclastic council assembled at Constantinople by Constantine V Copronymus in 754. This council anathe¬ matized the making, setting up and veneration of images as contrary to God’s commandments and the dogmas of the Fathers. It condemned any attempt to portray the indivisible hypostatic union of the nature of God the Word with flesh, asserting that the portrayal of Christ implies either a Nestorian separation of the humanity from the divinity or a monophysite confusion of uncircumscribed deity with manhood. Man alone is the earthly image of God, and the only proper image of Christ is the eucharistic bread and wine. The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 (the Seventh Ecumenical Council), made possible by the empress Irene’s reversal of imperial policy, ordered the setting up of images of Christ, the Theotokos, angels and saints. The reasons advanced by the council in justification of their decision are those which had been put forward during the controversy by John of Damascus and other opponents of the iconoclasts. Against the Christological objections to icons it is argued that a picture of Christ no more involves a separation of the humanity from the divinity than a portrait of an ordinary man implies a separation of his body from his soul, and that if a picture implies an apparent circumscription of deity the same is equally true of the actual infant in the manger. At the same time the Council endorsed the anti-iconoclastic writers’ insistence that the Second Commandment is not meant to be taken in a strictly literal sense, for veneration is not in fact paid to the image itself but to its subject; and Basil’s assertion that ‘the honour paid to the image passes through to the original’4 is taken out of its proper Trinitarian context and invoked in support of this principle. The purpose of an icon is therefore to put the worshipper in mind of, and stir up his devotion towards, its prototype. If, however, the icon is to be regarded in this way as an outward visual aid to devotion, and the devotion is really paid to the original - it may be to Christ - it seems somewhat inconsistent that at the same time 1 2 3 4

Julian fr. ep. (294C). Jo. D. imag. 2.7; 3.16. cf. canon 82 of the Council in Trullo (692). See above, p. 114.

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veneration is carefully defined as proskynesis, the reverential honour which, in another context, is paid to the human person of the emperor, and distinguished from the absolute worship (latria) that is due to God alone.1 A more positive understanding of the function of the icon, which has continued to exercise an immense influence on the devotion and the theology of the Eastern churches, is to be found in the view of John of Damascus and others that the icon is not merely an aid to devotion but a channel of divine grace, parallel in some degree to the sacraments.2

1 Jo. D. imag. 1.4; fid. orth. 4.15, 16. 2 Jo. D. imag. 1.19.

IX SALVATION, SIN AND GRACE In our discussion of individual theologians and in our survey of the Christological controversies we have touched on various aspects of patristic thought about man’s salvation. There are two central ideas, repeatedly expressed by the writers of this period, to which all those aspects are related and in the light of which they have to be understood. The first of these is the concept of ‘deification’ or ‘divinization’ (we use these terms as synonyms) as the goal of salvation and as the process by which the blessings of salvation, the fruit of Christ’s saving work, may be progressively experienced by the believer during this present life. The second is the interpretation of the saving work of Christ as an ‘exchange of places’ by which the Logos/Son took upon himself, or entered into, the human state in order to enable sinful, alienated and perishing human beings to enter, through incorporation into himself, the state of sonship towards God. ‘Sonship towards God’ is in fact virtually equivalent to wirat is generally denoted by ‘deification’ in patristic theology; for ‘deification’ or ‘likeness to God’ (homoiosis theoi) means the operation of sanctifying grace, already experienced by believers who are indwelt by the Spirit and enjoy com¬ munion with God as sons of a Father, but to be brought to its complete realization only in the final consummation. The most direct, and indeed startling, expression of the idea of deification in the New Testament is the characterization of believers as ‘partakers of the divine nature (physis)’ in 2 Pet. 1:4; but the usual scriptural basis of the patristic development of this idea is the Pauline teaching on adoptive sonship towards God and the re¬ creation of believers in the likeness of the Son of God. This transformation and renewal involves the replacement of human mortality by incorruptibility and immortal life. This understanding of salvation was also deeply rooted in the Platonist tradition. According to Plato the aim of the soul must be to flee from the world and become, so far as is possible, assimilated to God.1 In the myth in the Phaedrus the lover and his beloved jointly re-grow their souls’ lost wings through participating in their particular god, ‘in so far as a man can partake of a god', and the philosophical souls follow and participate in Zeus.2 So for Plotinus man’s aim is not simply to become free from sin but to ‘be a god’, one of the gods who follow the First God (i.e. Plato’s Zeus or the Good). It is to the gods that man should strive to become assimilated, 1 Plato Theaet. 176b; cf. Phaed. 82ab, Phaedr. 248a, Rep. 10.613a. 2 Phaedr. 253a.

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and not to good men, for likeness to good men is the likeness to each other of two pictures of the same subject, whereas likeness to the gods is likeness to the original model.1 Christian thinkers, with their doctrine of the re¬ fashioning of man in the likeness of the Logos, the exact image of God, and with Psalm 82:6 as their proof-text for the divine purpose of transforming men into ‘gods’, could readily assimilate the biblical to the Platonist tradition - always with the proviso that deification is God’s work of grace and not an achievement of the philosophical soul. As we have seen, Irenaeus believed that Psalm 82:6 is already being fulfilled for Christians who possess the ‘Spirit of adoption’, though final perfection must await the incorruptibility that will come through the eschatological vision of God.2 Theophilus of Antioch, too, held that if Adam had used the gift of freedom rightly he would have gained the reward of immortality and become a god.3 It is especially characteristic of Alexan¬ drian theology to associate man’s deification with illumination and gnosis. Thus Clement asserts that man is deified by illumination and the teaching of the Logos; being baptized we are illuminated, being illuminated we are made sons, being made sons we are perfected, being perfected we are made immortal in fulfilment of Psalm 82:6; the knowledge of God gives incorrupti¬ bility, and this is to partake of divinity; the ‘gnostic’ can already become a god, one of those of whom it is said ‘You are gods and all sons of the Most High’.4 For Origen, as we have seen, salvation means deification or re¬ deification.5 In his exegesis of Psalm 82:6 he ingeniously associates with that well-worn proof-text the words of Psalm 116:11, so as to read out of the scriptures the Platonic idea of the flight of the soul into the divine likeness: ‘I said in my ecstasy, Every man is a liar’ means that we ought to escape from being men and hasten to become gods; and it means, too, that those who are not liars but who stand on the truth, the rock of Exodus 33:21 which is Christ, are not men but the ‘gods’ of Psalm 82:6.® The deification of man through the ‘interchange of places’ between the Logos and mankind is also the central theme in Athanasius’ understanding of salvation: ‘He became man that we might be deified, and he revealed himself through a body that we might receive an idea of the invisible Father, and he himself endured insult from men that we might inherit incorruptibility’. ‘He assumed the created and human body in order that, having as creator renewed it, he might deify it in himself and thus bring us into the kingdom of heaven according to God’s likeness.7 Cyril of Alexandria repeats these themes: if God, he says, has become man, man has become a god; and this is possible because the deification of man is in Christ.8 The contribution of Gregory of Nyssa to this understanding of salvation is particularly important. Unlike Origen who held that man was created in 1 Plotinus Ennead. 1.2.6-7. 2 See above, p. 49. 3 Autol. 2.27. 4 prot. 11.114; paed. 1.5.26; str. 5.10.63; ib. 4.23.149; see also above, p. 68. 5 See above, p. 82. 6 Jn. 29.27, 29. 7 inc. 54; Ar. 2.70; see also above, p. 106. 8 Rom. 9.3; thes. 23 (229B).

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the beginning as pure spirit, Gregory believed that man was from the first a synthesis of soul and body. The first creation of the ideal man prefigured his ultimate state of blessedness; his reason reflected the beauty of God, but his upright posture indicated the dignity of his bodily nature which had received immortality as a special gift, his soul possessing it by nature.1 The ‘coats of skin’ with which God clothed Adam and Eve are, therefore, not, as for Origen, man’s physical body, but rather his animal nature and especially his sexuality.2 The final restoration (apocatastasis) is thus not a return of man’s soul to pure spirit, as Origen had held, but a return of all things, including man, to their original condition. The whole creation in a sense participates in God, for everything is a ‘substantiation’ of God’s will: ‘the divine will became the matter and substance of created things’.3 Man, however, has the special function and responsibility of mediating the spiritual to the material, for man is a bridge between the worlds of spirit and matter, the intelligible realm (kosmos noetos) and the sensible realm (kosmos aisthetos). He is a microcosm of each of the two worlds, created to enjoy God through his spiritual nature and to enjoy the world at the same time through the senses which belong to that world.4 Gregory is here using an idea which had its roots in Plato and had been developed by Philo; the thought that man, as a microcosm, is intended by God to link mortal creatures with immortal, rational with irrational, is also expressed in the treatise On the Nature of Man by the fourth century Christian writer Nemesius of Emesa.5 The link between the two worlds is formed, according to Gregory, when man’s rational mind reflects the divine beauty, which it contemplates, to nature and thus brings form and order to what would otherwise be formless matter. When, however, this harmony is broken by man's reason ceasing to contemplate God and thereby become assimilated to the divine goodness, this process is thrown into reverse. The formlessness of matter corrupts the beauty of nature, and this in turn further distorts the capacity of the reason to reflect the divine.6 For the soul this ‘fall’ does not mean extinction, for it is created immortal, but it means spiritual death, the separation of the soul from God, the source of the goodness that is true life. Through the Incarnation, however - the mingling of divine nature with human - Christ’s humanity was deified. This deification opens the way for all men to participate in divinity through conversion, renunciation of sin, moral effort and the sacraments; in baptism the soul is united to God, the eucharist is the principle of life for the body. Freedom from the passions (apatheia) restores harmony to soul and body, and when the predetermined number of souls has been attained man will be changed ‘in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump’ into the state of perfect apatheia.7 1 2 3 4

or. catech. 5; hom. opif. 7-8. anim. et res. (PG. 46.i48Cff.); cf. virg. 12. or. catech. 24; hom. in 1 Cor. 15:28. hom. opif. 2. 5 cf. Plato Timaeus 81 A, D; Philo q.r.d.h. 155; Nemesius 529B, 532Cff.). * hom. opif. 12. 7 perf. 8.1; or. catech. 37.

nat. hom. 1 {PG. 40.525A,

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This is not, according to Gregory, a static condition of blessedness. The soul will be active, sharing the divine activity of love (divine love being essentially self-knowledge, since God is perfect beauty and the beautiful is absolutely lovable).1 Gregory, however, goes further than this in his 'dynamic’ idea of salvation. To participate in divine virtues is a journey into infinity.2 Not only is there progress in perfection, but human perfection, unlike the static perfection of God, consists in progress. This does not mean that human aspirations are to be eternally frustrated. On the contrary, this idea of a progressive heaven rests on the belief that on this journey there can be no point of arrival, for the journey has no end. True fulfilment, and therefore ultimate salvation, consists in an eternal progress into that which must lie eternally beyond man, since man is a creature.3 This realization that deification is an infinite progress follows logically from the acknowledgment that the Psalmist’s ‘gods and sons of the Most High’ are not consubstantial with uncreated deity. Their deification is not ‘according to substance’ for they never lose their creaturely status — a truth which is expressly stated in different ways by Eusebius, Athanasius, Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus.4 Deification is always the work of God, an operation of the Spirit or a gift of grace.5 No theologian emphasizes this more plainly than the Christianized Neoplatonist ‘Dionysius the Areopagite’. Having defined deification in the Platonic manner as ‘assimilation to, and union with, God so far as this is attainable’ and stated that the means towards it is contemplation,6 he quotes Jn. 1:12 to show that this likeness to God through union with him has been made possible because God has given us the power to become his children.7 Deification, which can also be understood as the imitation of God, is his own gift, a gift of grace proceeding from the one who alone is God by nature and not by grace.8 This teaching is echoed in the seventh century by Dionysius’ expositor Maximus the Confessor. Deification, which consists in the knowledge of God, love and peace9 cannot be effected by any natural power of our own; we can but experience it through grace as a supernatural gift, for nothing created can deify: it belongs to the grace of God alone to bestow deification on created beings in due proportion.10 Its ultimate source is God’s love and goodness,11 and it crowns his work of creation: God is the author both of being and of well being, creator by nature of the being of all that is, and author by grace of the deification of his creatures. Echoing the language of 2 Peter, the Book of Wisdom and 1 John, Maximus declares that God has ‘made us to become partakers of divine nature and sharers in his own 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

anim. et res. (PG. 46.93B-97A). v. Mos. 1.7-8. hom. in Cant. 12. Eus. e.th. 3.18; Ath. inc. et c. Ar. 9; Max. cap. 1.62; Jo. D. fid. orth. 2.12. cf. Origen hom. 6.5 in Ex.; Didymus Trin. 2.25; Cyril Jn. 1.10 (105C). e.h. 1.3. ib. 2.2.1. ep. 2; e.h. i.4. myst. {PG. 91.680C). cap. 1.75; cf. opusc. (PG. 91.33C); arnbig. (PG. 91.1237B); qu. Thai. 22. ep. 2 (PG. 91.393B); ep. 9 (PG. 91.445C).

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eternity and to appear like him through that deification by grace' which is the goal of all creation.1 The ground of this is the interchange of deity and humanity in the Incarnation, by which human nature was deified, man becoming God in so far as God became man. This is the assurance that ‘he who became man without sin will deify human nature without transmuting it into deity’.2 Maximus seems at one point to go further than this and to envisage a kind of continuing incarnation of God in the deification of believers, or at any rate a continuing extension of the reciprocal interchange between deity and manhood by which man is made God and God appears as man: a reciprocal ‘hominization’ of God and ‘divinization’ of man through God’s lovingkindness (philanthropia) on the one hand and man’s response of virtuous conduct on the other.3 Like Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus emphasizes man’s role as a participant in two realms4 and the consequent cosmic implications of his salvation. Man is intended to become the mediating link or bridge to span the divisions between male and female, paradise and the world of men, heaven and earth, the ‘intelligible’ and ‘sensible’ realms of being, God and his creation. He comes to perform his proper function in so far as he attains freedom from the passions, cultivates a holy way of life which abolishes the difference between this world and paradise, imitates the life and the knowledge of the angels, and enters into union with God.5 Our examples of this concept of man’s salvation have so far been drawn from Greek writers, but it is by no means absent from Latin theology. Tertullian, for instance, points out that scripture does not hesitate to call men who have become sons of God through faith ‘gods’, though he interprets this eschatologically: men are not yet gods nor are they yet in heaven.6 Ambrose, again, echoes traditional teaching when he says that knowledge of the Logos brings us participation in divine nature, and at the same time draws the contrast between the ‘gods’ of Psalm 82:6, who are the saints, and Christ who is not, like them, a man who received ‘the inspiration of deity’ (i.e. a Spirit-inspired man).7 Augustine makes much use of the idea of deification which he equates with sonship towards God. Justification implies deification, because by justifying men God makes them his sons; if we have been made sons of God (Jn. 1:12) we have also been made gods, not through a natural begetting but through the grace of adoption.8 To become gods means that believers live ‘according to God’ and not ‘according to the flesh’, and it is through loving God that they are made into gods. This love must include the human neighbour, for if a human being denies humanity to a fellow man God will deny him divinity, that is to say the immortality by which he makes men gcds.9 1 cap. 4.32; ep. 24 (PG. 91.609C). 2 cap. 1.62; cf. ambig. (PG. 91.1113B). 3 ep. 2 (PG. 91.401B). * myst. 7.

5 ambig. (PG. 91.1304D-1313B; cf. 1193C-1196B). 6 Prax. 13; res. cam. 49. 7 ep. 29, 3, 14; fid. 5.1.23. 8 enarr. in Ps. 49.2. 9 civ. Dei 14.4.2; serm. 121.1; serm. 259.3.

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The ground of deification, once again, is the Incarnation. ‘God', says Augustine, ‘wishes to make you a god, not by nature like him whom he begat, but by his gift and adoption. For as he through humanity became partaker of your mortality, so through exaltation he makes you partaker of his immortality.’1 In the Incarnation the ‘human divinity’ and the ‘divine humanity’ of Christ mediate between divinity in itself and humanity in itself.2 Augustine repeats more often, perhaps, than any of the Greek theologians, the theme of the ‘interchange of places’. ‘The Word’, he says, ‘became what we are that we might attain what we are not. For we are not God; but we can see God with the mind and interior eye of the heart.’ ‘To make those who were men “gods”, he who was God was made man.’ ‘The divinity of the Son became partaker of our mortality, that we might be partakers of his immortality.' ‘For you he who was Son of God became son of man, so that you who were sons of men might be made sons of God’; so, Augustine concludes, ‘do not think it impossible to become sons of God; for you he who was Son of God became son of man.’3 Augustine finds support for his teaching on deification in other texts besides Psalm 82:6. Like Origen, he introduces Psalm 116:11: ‘All men are liars if they are not sons of the Most High. If you are sons of God, redeemed by the Saviour’s grace, purchased by his precious blood, reborn by water and the Spirit, predestined to the inheritance of heaven as sons of God, then you are gods.’4 ‘God is the great king above all gods’ (Psalm 95:3) because he is above all men whom he has willed to make into gods by grace and not by nature; that is, all who believe in him, to whom he gave power to become sons of God.5 Matthew 16:23 shows Christ blaming Peter because he thinks as men think. ‘What then’, asks Augustine, ‘does he want to make us to be, if he blames us because we are men? The answer is given in Psalm 82:6: “I said, you are gods”.'6 Salvation, according to Augustine, is the renewal of man in the image of God. The human soul is not a part of God; otherwise it would be wholly immutable and incorruptible, but this is not so: man’s defects and infirmity cannot be simply ascribed to the body. It is in a sense, however, immortal because, although it dies when it is alienated from communion with God, it does not actually cease to be. The image of God is not wholly abolished (Augustine cites Psalm 39:7, reading ‘Man walks in God’s image’); but man’s nature is vitiated.7 Man’s creation in God’s image does not mean that even if he had not sinned he would have been equal and coeternal with God; the likeness of God in man cannot even be compared with the original. It means that if he had used his freewill to obey God he would have been for ever blessed and immortal; but God created man in the foreknowledge that he would sin, but foreknowing also that from his progeny there would come saints seeking not their own, but giving glory to their creator, who by 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

serm. 166.4. serm. 47.12.21. serm. 117. -5; serm. 1.92.1; serm. 117.10; serm. 121.5; serm. 119.5. serm. 81.6. enarr. in Ps. 94.6. serm. 76.2.3. Trin. 14.4.6.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

*55

worshipping him and being freed from corruption would deserve to live for ever in blessedness with the angels.1 This is the renewal of the image, which man himself cannot achieve; he can de-form it, but only the artificer who made it can re-form it. It is renewed through the love of God and participa¬ tion in him, and will be perfectly restored through the vision of God in the post-resurrection life. ‘God hates you as you are, in order to make you what you are not yet. You will be what he is’; but Augustine hastens to add that this means that we shall be God's image in the sense in which a man’s reflection in a mirror is his image inasmuch as it is like him, not in the sense in which a man’s son is his image inasmuch as he is actually what his father is ‘according to substance’.2 Participation in God is beatitude, for God is himself the beatitude ‘in whom and by whom and through whom all that is blessed is blessed’; salvation, according to Augustine, is therefore ‘fruition’, the perfect enjoyment of God.3 It was not until Augustine’s time that the relation of divine grace, to which every Christian ascribed the salvation of man, to the freedom of the human will became a subject of controversy. It had been of some peripheral importance in connection with Apollinarian ideas about the consequences of admitting a human rational soul in Christ, but it had not been thought out in any systematic way by the earlier Christian writers. Predestination tended to be treated as a dangerous concept, and the Pauline passages which suggested it were something of an embarrassment which patristic commentators, such as Origen and Chrysostom in particular, sought to explain in terms which would not impugn the freedom of the human will to take the initiative in repentance and faith. This freedom was of central importance in the Christian apologetic against pagan fatalism and the influence of astrology, and in the orthodox repudiation of Gnostic deter¬ minism, especially, from the middle of the third century onwards, in its Mamchaean form. According to this the world, including man except in so far as he may become aware that he has in his inner being a particle of the divine and may thus be saved out of the world, lies in the realm of darkness to which by its nature and origin it inescapably belongs. This general insistence on the freedom of the will was accompanied by a parallel emphasis on the moral law. The Pauline teaching that Christ is the end of the law was generally interpreted as meaning that Christ is the law's goal, the end, in that sense, to which the moral law of the Old Testament (from which the ceremonial law was distinguished, Christ being indeed the ‘end’ of this in the other sense of the word, since its significance was typo¬ logical and not literal) had always been directed. This moral law was held by Christian apologists to be in essence a universal law of nature, capable of being apprehended in some degree by the Gentile world, so that Christian preachers could appeal to the ethical teaching of the philosophers and Christian ethics could be stated in traditional classical forms, as in the adaptation by Ambrose in his De Officiis Ministrorum of the Stoicism of Cicero’s De Officiis. God required men to keep his commandments and do 1 de. Gen. ad litt. lib. imperf. 16.61; serm. 24.3; serm. 278.2; catech. rud. 18.30. 2 serm. 43.3.4; Trin. 14.14.18; 14.18.24; serm. 8.8.9. 3 c. Faust. 20.5; soliloq. 1.1.3; beat. vit. 4.33; lib. arbitr. 2.13.36.

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good works. The believer who had sinned after baptism was required to perform good works by way of compensation. It could not be supposed that men were inherently incapable of directing their wills to the fulfilment of God’s demands. Further, since Christ’s teaching could be construed as offering a special reward for fuller self-sacrifice than was required of the ordinary run of believers, it was generally held that a life of perfection, the ‘evangelical’ or ‘angelic’ life, was possible for those who possessed heroic sanctity. Since deification, the ultimate goal of blessedness, involved free¬ dom from the passions, the ‘evangelical counsels’ were identified with asceticism and increasingly from the earlier part of the fourth century onwards with the monastic movement and communal withdrawal from the world. This view was not accepted everywhere. From Jerome’s polemic Against Jovinian it appears that Jovinian held that the grace of baptism implies that all the baptized are equally and communally the temple of the Spirit; after the Judgement all will enjoy equal blessedness rather than rewards proportionate to their achievements. For the most part, however, the way to blessedness was understood within the monastic system as the ascent of a ladder of perfection towards the fullness of contemplation, and, for the ordinary believer, as a life of faith and works which merited reward from God. It is true that in commenting on Paul many theologians taught that we are justified 'by faith alone'. The actual phrase occurs in Basil, Chryso¬ stom, Ambrose, and others, including (surprisingly, at first sight) Pelagius himself. The framework of reference for sola fide is different, however, from -what it was to be in the Reformation controversies. It is concerned with conversion and acceptance of the Christian Faith, and is especially associ¬ ated with the justifying grace of baptism. Thus free will and man’s ability to repent and to win the rewards of obedience to God’s commandments were generally assumed in early Christian thought. This does not mean that there was little appreciation of man’s sin or God’s grace. From Ignatius and Melito onwards1 grace is seen as the distinctive characteristic of the Christian dispensation as contrasted with pre-Christian legalism. It is acknowledged to be the necessary source of all virtues in the present life, the means by which sin and the devil are over¬ come, and, as we have seen, the ground and the agency of ultimate deifica¬ tion. The idea that grace is indefectible, however, was associated with Gnostic determinism.2 Grace was seen as altogether compatible with human free will;3 prevenient grace may be acknowledged, but man's effort must co-operate with grace in the Christian life. Chrysostom can even preach that man’s effort has to take the initiative, so that grace is in some measure a response of God to man.4 The grace of forgiveness is freely given in baptism, but constant effort is required if it is to be preserved intact. Grace is divine assistance, enabling, strengthening and inspiring men in good works. It does not simply take over when human effort fails; still less does it 1 2 3 4

Ign. Magn. 8.1; Mel. pass. 2.11. Iren. haer. 1.6.4; Heracleon ap. Or. Jn. 13.10. e.g., Chrysostom hom 11.1 in Act.; hom. 45.1 in Matt. hom. 1.5 in 2 Cor. 4:13.

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render effort superfluous, but at every point it co-operates with the rightlymotivated human will. The reality of sin was also recognized. Athanasius’ view of original sin is typical of Eastern theology. Adam turned from the contemplation of the Logos, which was a supematurally given possibility for him, conferring immortality, and lapsed into an ever-worsening entanglement with the material world and idolatry, thus plunging the human race into corruption and causing the defacement and virtual obliteration of the divine image in man.1 Thus Athanasius has a very clear picture of the involvement of all men in the Fall, and of the subjection of all men, in consequence, to sinful¬ ness and death. This does not mean that all possibility of obedience to God has been lost, for some men may have altogether avoided actual sin,2 and, since the effect of the Fall is thought of so largely in terms of corruption, and salvation in terms of the restoration of immortality, the question whether guilt is actually transmitted to each individual because of Adam’s sin is not raised in its later form. Athanasius thinks of the reversion of man to corruption as the execution of God’s sentence of death against dis¬ obedience; all men are therefore, but for the vicarious payment of their penalty by Christ, under sentence of death as part of a doomed humanity; but it can scarcely be said that each man bears a burden of actual guilt. The Cappadocians and Antiochenes follow similar lines of thought. The idea of an inheritance of actual guilt is expressly repudiated through the assertion that infants are bom free from sin.3 The freedom of the will is strongly affirmed against Manichaeism, and the Fall and its continuing consequences was the result of man’s free choice of evil.4 All men are involved in these consequences, wrhich include moral infirmity and bias towards sin, and the progressive disintegration of mankind, individually and socially. According to Antiochene exegesis the divine image in man consists in his domination over creation, and this has not been lost by the Fall; the divine likeness consists in man's freedom to control his passions, and it is this which has been impaired. Western thought was not markedly different. Tertullian, as we have seen,5 did not interpret the corruption of Adam’s progeny as involving the trans¬ mission of actual guilt, and regarded the baptism of children as dangerous. At about the same time, however, and also in Africa, the idea that un¬ baptized children are doomed to torment found expression in the martyr Perpetua’s vision of Dinocrates, her brother who had died as a child;6 and Cyprian differs in this respect from his ‘master’, Tertullian, in permitting no delay in the baptism of new-born infants, for they have contracted the contagion of death by their birth, on account of Adam’s sin.7 Ambrose

1 gent. 3; me. 4ft. 2 At. 3.33. 3 Gr. Naz. or 40.23; Gr. Nyss. de infantibus qui praemature moriuntur; Chrys. hom. 28.3 in Matt. 4 Bas. hom. 9.7; Gr. Nyss. or. catech. 7; Chrys. hom. 20.3 in Gen. 5 See above, p. 61. 6 M. Perp. 4. 7 ep. 64.5.

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believed strongly in the solidarity of all men with, or rather in, Adam,1 and he interestingly defines Adam’s transgression as his attempt to gain equality with God, an idea that was perhaps expressed in PhiL 2:6; he also maintains that the washing-away of original sin is sacramentally effected in the feetwashing which was part of the Milanese rite of initiation, whereas baptism cleanses from actual sin.2 Yet Ambrose ascribes to infant baptism the positive effect of the opening of the kingdom of heaven to the baptized rather than the negative result of cleansing from inherited sin.3 He does, however, think that original sin, meaning by this a sinful propensity rather than actual culpability for sin, is transmitted by physical generation - a disastrous notion which could easily be read out of Psalm 51 .'5.4 Here Ambrose anticipates the thought of Augustine, and another vitally im¬ portant aspect of this was foreshadowed by the exegesis of the commentator ‘Ambrosiaster’ on the'text Romans 5:12, where ‘inasmuch as all sinned’ was represented in the Old Latin version by ‘in whom all sinned’. This was taken to mean that in Adam all men sinned ‘as in a lump’; all are therefore sinners, born in sin. This idea was at the centre of the Pelagian controversy. The conflict between Augustine himself and Pelagius with his supporters Celestius and Julian of Eclanum (who championed Pelagianism in the later stages of the controversy) began gradually. Augustine began to involve himself in it when he heard that some were teaching that infants receive sanctification in Christ through baptism, but not forgiveness of sins, that is to say, of original sin.5 Pelagius had reacted against the apparent denigration of free will which, as he thought, was implied in Augustine’s prayer in his Confes¬ sions, ‘Give what thou dost command, and command what thou dost will’.6 Pelagius’ own views were not notably different at the outset from most traditional theology, especially in the East, but the teaching of himself and his associates became more sharply defined and in some respect exaggerated under the pressure of the controversy which reached its acute stage after Pelagius’ work On Nature had been answered in 415 by Augustine’s On Nature and Grace. Pelagius was concerned, especially in his Exposition of the Epistles of Paul, to refute the Christological heresies and also any tendency in respect of the doctrines of sin and grace towards the Manichaeism which Augustine had himself professed as a young man, and against the orthodox view of creation which, he held, must include human free will and the possibility for every man of genuine moral struggle and progress. He believed that, if the goodness of the Creator were not to be denied with the Manichaeans, man must be a creature endowed with reason and conscience and the capacity to follow reason and obey conscience. He is capable by nature of turning in either direction, with a genuine capacity for good and evil. There could be no sense in speaking of man’s virtue if he did not possess freedom of 1 2 3 4 5 6

e.g., excess, fratr. Satyr. 2.6. myst. 32; sacr. 3.1.5!?. A br. 2.79. apol. proph. Dav. 56. pecc. merit. 3.6.12. conf. 10.40; persev. 53.

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deliberate choice; our nature is not bound to a necessity either of sinning or of immutable goodness.1 It is thus at least theoretically possible that a man might not sin. This is involved in the reality of the freedom to move in either direction. It is a possibility which, as being bound up with authentic free will, is a gift of God. Freedom itself is not attained by the exercise of free choice, and it must therefore be recognized as a built-in constituent of human nature (indeed, the central constituent which distinguishes man from other creatures), and thus a gift of grace. It is, in fact, a gift of a quality which is one of the attributes of God, though Pelagius does not clearly distinguish the necessary reservations which should be made in transferring the concept of freedom from the idea of God to that of human freedom to sin or not to sin.2 It is thus to what one may call the grace of creation that man owes his basic freedom as a moral agent. By the grace of redemption he is freely forgiven in conversion and baptism. Through the reconciliation effected by Christ's sacrificial death3 men are accepted by God, being justified by faith alone.4 5 Grace enables men to live without sin and to carry out ‘the more easily what they are commanded to do through their free will'.6 Pelagius can speak, like Augustine, of grace as divine assistance, but he thinks of this assistance chiefly in terms of the teaching of God and the revelation both of God's will and of the rewards promised to those who do good. Grace enlightens the understanding and stirs the will towards a longing for God.6 As a modern exponent of Pelagius expresses it: ‘We might capture Pelagius’ whole teaching on the grace of Christ as “help” in a single formula: Christ by the example of his life, by his commandments, and by his teaching concerning man and God has brought the final revelation of that “way” for man which leads to life and in doing so has brought “help” sufficient to overcome the power of sinful habit’.7 Pelagius thinks of grace as bestowed in the basic conditions and the external framework, as it were, of the Christian life, rather than as a power infused into the soul of the Christian. It lays out the race-track, as one might say, round which the believer has to run his course, provides signs and directions to assist him to follow the right way, and gives him exhortation and encouragement as through a coach's megaphone; it does not act, as the Greek theologians had supposed, like an auxiliary engine on a racing cyclist’s machine, nor, as Augustine believed, as the machine itself, or, rather, as the rider’s actual legs, lungs and heart. It was not, therefore, an entirely fair criticism of Pelagius when Jerome accused him of inconsistency in saying that a man can achieve sinlessness through his own efforts and at the same time maintaining that he can do nothing without grace.8 Pelagius did not mean by ‘grace’ what Jerome and ep. Dem. 2ff. nat. et grat. 53; 59. 3 Pelag. exp. epp. Paul 33.10; 320.12. 4 ib. 9.15; 34-20; 346.6ff. 5 Aug. grat. Chr. 5; 30. 6 ib. 8; 11. 7 R. F. Evans, Pelagius: Inquiries and Reappraisals 8 Jerome ep. 133. 1 Pelag.

2 Aug.

(A & C Black, 1968), p. 111.

i6o

A History of Christian Doctrine

Augustine meant by it; he believed that freedom to obey or disobey God's law (and in his insistence on this freedom he owed much to the teaching of Origen, brought to the West in the Latin translations of Rufinus of Aquileia) was itself given to men by grace. So, too, the Law of Moses is itself a means of grace and a manifestation of grace. The moral precepts of the Law reinforced the law of nature which had been man’s guide between Adam and Moses, and enabled him to obey God and merit his rewards. If the Law did not provide justification this was because men, by their free choice, failed to keep it.1 Scripture as a whole is the source of law and so of grace to show men how to live well and encourage them to do so.2 Aided by grace, in this sense, those who have come to faith may live righteously, by which Pelagius means without sinning. For faith, if genuine, produces works of righteousness.3 Adam, according to Pelagius, committed the primal transgression and thus sin came into the world, not by transmission but because men followed Adam’s example and imitated his disobedience.4 Sin is always in Pelagius' view a matter of concrete acts of wrong-doing; and since wrong-doing takes place through the exercise of free choice it cannot be an inevitable element in the make-up of every man, nor can any man be held guilty of sin unless he has consciously willed it.6 The soul, furthermore, is created anew for each individual and is not derived by inheritance from progenitors; there cannot therefore be original sin in the sense of transmitted bias, let alone culpability, since sin resides in the soul and not the body. Pelagius thus denies Ambrosiaster’s interpretation of ‘in whom all sinned’.6 Pelagius therefore argues that every child is bora, so far as his individual soul is concerned, as a fresh creation of God and therefore good. If a child were to inherit original sin, then the child of baptized parents ought, by the same argument, to inherit original righteousness in the sense, at least, of a bias towards good. By a similar argument Pelagius argues that if those who have not actually sinned are guilty of Adam’s sin, then those who have not believed in Christ are in a state of salvation through Christ’s righteousness.7 Pelagius accordingly holds that baptized infants inherit the Kingdom of God, but that those who die unbaptized are not doomed to perdition; sin is not a ‘substance’ but consists in freely chosen action, and cannot as it were enter into human nature and permanently debilitate it.8 This does not mean that Pelagius takes an excessively optimistic view of man’s actual capacity to avoid sin. On the contrary, he thinks of a cumulative intensification of the grip of sin upon the human race. Individual acts of sin build up into social sin, and thus men find themselves enslaved to the habit of sin. In this sense one could almost say that Pelagius holds a doctrine of original sin, for sin as social habit imposes a kind of necessity of sinning on the individual 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

exp. epp. Paul. 57.i8ff.; 246.19; ep. Dem. 8. ep. Dem. 9. virg. 6; exp. epp. Paul. 34.9-19; 37.1. exp. epp. Paul. 45.1 iff.; Aug. nat. et grat. 10. Aug. nat. et grat. 21; 33ff.; 8; 10; 13; 54. ib. 21; exp. epp. Paul. 47-7ff. Aug. pecc. orig. 14; gest. Pelag. 2. nat. et grat. 10; 21.

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despite the fact that he started life free from a sinful inheritance. Indeed, the sinful habit is so strong that the Law was rendered incapable of setting men free from it and needed to be replaced by the new law of Christ.1 Men are themselves responsible for this state of affairs since virtually all men contribute to this accumulation of social habit. Nevertheless, both before and after Moses there have been a few saints who have lived without sin.2 On predestination Pelagius said relatively little; in so far as he makes use of the idea at all it is that God has determined the relation of reward to moral effort and that those whose conversion is foreknown by God are recipients of grace.3 The teaching of Pelagius’ supporter Celestius is represented in a summary form by his theses which a council at Carthage condemned in 411 or early in 412. According to these, Adam was created mortal, and would have died whether or not he sinned; his sin injured himself alone and not the entire human race; infants are in the same state as Adam was in his condition of original righteousness before he sinned; the whole human race neither dies through Adam’s death nor rises through Christ’s resurrection; the Law, no less than the Gospel, can provide a way into the kingdom of heaven; even before the advent of Christ there were some sinless men.4 The first of these propositions was again anathematized at Carthage in 418, but by avoiding the implications of that relationship between mortality and original sin which

was

generally

assumed

as

axiomatic

it

could

have

eased

the

theological problem of sin aud redemption. Celestius seems to have differed from Pelagius in his view concerning the state of infants; the latter held that since infants cannot exercise rational moral choice they cannot be said to share the original condition of Adam.5 The moral teaching of Celestius included a requirement that the rich must renounce their property on receiving baptism; otherwise their good deeds would not be credited to them and they could not inherit the Kingdom.6 This may possibly have been a reason for the intervention of the secular power to exile Pelagius and Celestius in 418. Despite the condemnation of Celestius at Carthage, a council at Diospolis in

Palestine in

accusations,

415

vindicated the

Pelagian position against Western

greatly to the indignation of

Jerome at

Bethlehem.

The

African Church leaders, however, obtained a condemnation of it from Pope Innocent in 416, but his successor, Zosimus, reversed this verdict. After the intervention of the emperor Honorius, however, and a further condemnation by a large council at Carthage in 418, Zosimus adhered to the view of the African Church. At Ephesus in 431 Pelagianism was condemned in the persons of Celestius and his associates, though this was largely due to the alleged connection of these Western heretics with the party of Nestorius, Julian of Eclanum having been received by Theodore of Mopsuestia.7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

ep. Dem. 8; Aug. grat. Chr. 43; exp. epp. Paul. 59.13. ep. Dem. 6; 8. exp. epp. Paul. 68.23s.; 69.7s. Aug. pecc. orig. 2ff.; Marius Mercator commonit. Caelest. 1. Aug. pecc. orig. 13; 16. ib. 12; cf. de divitiis (Migne, PL. suppl. 1.1380) possibly by Celestius. Schwartz A.C.O. 1.1.3, p. 9.

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The council of 418, besides condemning the theory of Adam’s mortality, anathematized the view that infants ought not immediately to be baptized (Pelagius in fact attempted rather illogically to maintain the practice of infant baptism within his theological system), and that they are not baptized for a genuine remission of sin, that is to say, original sin which they have contracted through physical generation. It condemned the idea of limbo, John 3:5 being taken to mean that salvation is literally impossible for the unbaptized. It rejected the reference of justifying grace to the remission of past sins and not also to assistance against the committing of sins in the future, and also the Pelagian understanding of grace as enlighten¬ ment rather than power to do what we know we ought to do. The council also repudiated the somewhat unfortunate statement of Pelagius that grace enables man to do more easily what he is commanded to do by the exercise of free will, and attacked the notion of the possibility of sinlessness and the implied corollary that ‘Forgive us our trespasses’ might occasionally be prayed vicariously for others rather than for the saintly user of the prayer.1 All these anathemas represent the Augustinian position against Pelagius. According to Augustine all men have sinned in Adam. The Fall was the consequence of Adam’s misuse of free will which had been granted to him as the means by which he might obey God and be deterred from sinning, and by which he might make even further progress in the state of original righteousness. All Adam’s progeny has been contaminated by Adam’s sin, not by voluntarily following his example but by being in Adam ‘as in a root'; it is therefore under the divine sentence of death and damnation, doomed to carry its burden of original sin to the appointed end which is eternal punishment with the rebellious angels. Indeed, the process of generation itself, involving carnal desire, is both an extension of, and also a kind of penalty for, the primal sin of Adam which is concupiscence. Mankind, rooted in Adam,- is thus a ‘condemned lump’.2 By ‘concupiscence’ Augustine meant desire for that which is opposed to God, and hence self-centred desire which seeks another object of attraction and devotion in the place of God. Unfortunately, he regarded sexual desire as a primary and obvious expression of concupiscence, and laid himself open to the powerful attack of Julian of Eclanum against what the latter regarded as Augustine’s Manichaean association of the transmission of original sin with physical generation.3 However much he might protest that he did not intend to denigrate marriage, Augustine always regarded sexual desire as irrational and a token of man’s fallen condition. He had held this view long before the Pelagian controversy began, and it is fully expressed in his early anti-Manichaean writings. For the Manichaeans it was procreation which was especially abhorrent, since it perpetuated the involvement of spirit with matter - the imprisonment of the divine element in man within a fleshly body. This notion that procreation is a worse sin than sexual intercourse aroused Augustine’s strong objections, causing him to make the disastrously revealing statement that unless sexual intercourse within marriage is 1 Hahn, pp. 213-15. 2 enchir. 8-9. 3 c. duas epp. Pelag. 9ft.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

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directed towards procreation it is a form of prostitution: the wife is then joined to a man for the purpose of gratifying his lust in return for certain benefits. He also committed himself to the belief that God’s will allows carnal desire to be released from the control of reason in sexual intercourse only for the purpose of propagating children.1 In his early works, indeed, Augustine thought that Genesis 1:27-28 should not be interpreted literally;2 later, however, he acknowledged that sexuality existed in man’s state of original righteousness, but held that it was then totally subject to reason.3 Augustine’s views on this subject were neither original nor surprising. The sexual morality of the Roman Empire was generally low and Christianity did little to improve this, for, apart from the high estimate of marriage implied by the teaching of Jesus on divorce and his grounding of marriage in God’s original creation of man (Genesis 2:24), Christianity was consider¬ ably inferior to Judaism in its theological understanding of sex. As early as the writing of Paul’s first letter to them there were evidently many Corinthian Christians who regarded sexual intercourse as sinful, and Paul’s apparently compromising attitude towards their views, as expressed in 1 Corinthians 7:1, gave encouragement to the exaltation of virginity which became a strongly marked feature of almost all Christian preaching and teaching in the patristic period. Indeed, in much popular literature, such as the Apocryphal Acts, the apostolic mission is presented almost as though it were primarily an anti-sex movement. Admittedly, much of this literature is more or less heavily tinged with Gnosticism, but writers of a very different intellectual calibre, such as Clement,4 do not differ significantly from Augustine in their attitude. Although the pressure of Manichaean heresy compelled orthodox writers of the fourth century to uphold the legitimacy of Christian marriage, and the ascetic movement launched in the later decades of that century by Priscillian of Avila was condemned because, among other false beliefs, the Priscillianists held that such marriage was ‘exsecrable’,5 the immensely high spiritual value placed on virginity6 and the identification of the ascetic and monastic vocation with the ‘angelic life’ resulted in a very general consensus that human sexuality, if not actually evil (which no orthodox theologian could directly assert) was certainly regrettable. Jerome’s opponent, Jovinian, was one of the few explicit opponents of this general view, teaching that marriage is not inferior to celibacy. Jerome’s attack on this doctrine was so fierce as to make the theological distinction between his own view of marriage and that of Manichaeism appear to be very finely drawn; in its turn, Jerome’s denigration of marriage in his Against Jovinian aroused the alarm of an unnamed monk at Rome who was probably Pelagius,7 then, as later in the controversy with Augustine, intensely suspicious of any tendency towards a Manichaean rejection of the orthodox doctrine of creation. 1 2 3 * 5 6 7

de moribus Manich. 18.65; c■ Faust. 22.30; cf. de bono conjug. 6. de Gen. c. Manich. 1.19; 2.11. de Gen. ad. litt. 9; 10; civ. Dei 14.21, 24; c. duas epp. Pelag. 1.17. See above, p. 67. First Council of Toledo (400) anath. 15 (Hahn, p. 212). e.g., in the treatises On Virginity of Basil of Ancyra and Gregory of Nyssa. Jerome ep. 50.

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According to Augustine, ‘from the time when "through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so death passed on into all men, in whom all sinned”, the whole lump of perdition became the possession of the one who causes perdition. No one, therefore, either has been freed, or is being freed, or will be freed from this state except by the grace of the Redeemer.’1 Augustine relied greatly on this text (Romans 5:12). He attacked Julian of Eclanum as a reckless innovator for translating the Latin in quo in the sense of ‘inasmuch as'.2 He himself usually associated it with I Corinthians 15:22 (‘As in Adam all die’),3 and used it to prove that all men are sinners, not through imitating Adam but by actually partici¬ pating in him, just as they are saved through participation in Christ’s grace and not by imitating him. He does, however, offer an alternative interpreta¬ tion of in quo: ‘(the sin) in which all sinned’. It then signifies that besides the actual sins of each individual all alike are guilty of having sinned in the primal sin.4 Augustine finds his idea of original sin in such scriptural passages as Psalm 51:5 as well as in Romans 5:12, and he believes it to be confirmed by the practice of infant baptism. To the Pelagians infant baptism was an established practice which they were not concerned to repudiate — Celestius maintained that he always said infants needed baptism and ought to be baptized; what more, he asked, could anyone ask?5 — but it was apt to be a theological embarrassment. For Augustine it was a welcome piece of evidence for the truth of his theology. Although infant baptism had become the general practice it was in some degree a rite searching for a theological rationale. Augustine formulated a rationale and read this back out of the rite. This was especially easy in so far as the Church had never evolved a baptismal rite specifically designed for infants, but applied to them the service for adult converts including the exorcisms and the renunciation of the devil. If, he argues, all this is to be taken seriously (which he never doubts), the sin from which infants are really rescued in baptism must be ‘original sin through wdiich they are captives in the devil’s power’.6 It is no mere bias towards sin which is transmitted to Adam’s offspring but the actual guilt of sin. Indeed, it may be said to be primarily guilt, because this is what the grace of baptism removes. The inheritance of sin, that is, of evil disposition or regrettable limitation, remains after baptism, but the guilt attaching to these is put away. Here Augustine had to meet a difficult Pelagian argument: if concupiscence is the essence of sin and if it is inherent in sex, why does it obviously remain in the baptized, since they continue to beget children, and is not abolished in baptism? Alternatively, if sexual concupiscence is not a sin in a baptized parent, why is it a sin in his child (unless baptized)? Augustine maintains that guilt is remitted in baptism, but concupiscence remains, though without the imputation of guilt. Ignorance is a great source of evil: baptism does not cure it, and 1 2 3 4 5 6

grat. Chr. et pecc. 2.34. c. Jul. 6.24.75. c. Faust. 22.78; pecc. merit. 1.8.8; 3.11.19. pecc. merit. 1.11. pecc. orig. 4.3. nupt. et concup. 1.22.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

165

ignorance of God’s will, such as that with which Paul reproached the baptized Corinthians, remains; but it is not imputed as sin. Concupiscence, admittedly, is a much greater evil; but though it persists in Christians it is no longer imputed as sin and it will gradually be overcome by progress in sanctification, by growth in more and more fervent charity: it is diminished day by day in those who are advanced in the spiritual life and in continence, and ‘especially as old age comes on’.1 Augustine cannot say that procreation ought to cease among the baptized. He was already too vulnerable to the Pelagian accusation that he was still at heart a Manichaean. He has to affirm that in itself it is good, being ordained by the Creator; but he goes so far as to follow Ambrose (so he claims) in supposing that the conception of Christ without human intercourse freed him from the chain of original sin.2 All others except Christ were in Adam when he sinned through his free choice and so vitiated human nature.3 Augustine claims that against the Manichaeans he acknowledges the goodness of marriage and the legitimacy of procreation; but at the same time he says unequivocally that sexual desire, though not actually imputed as sin to the regenerate, is an element in human nature which sin has introduced. In itself it is shameful, though, since he cannot deny that procreation is a work of God, he allows that it can have a ‘good use’ for that purpose only.4 It is both the daughter and the mother of sin; it is therefore the means by which original sin is transmitted and continues to hold captive all who are not reborn in Christ who was bom without concupiscence.5 This close relationship of sex to the primal sin is a topic to which Augustine returns again and again. This is because his identification of concupiscence to a large extent with sexual desire underlies his picture of the universality of sin, its hereditary transmission, and the powerlessness of man to break free from it. It is also because it was here that his opponents found the weakest point in his theological system where his hold on the orthodox doctrine of creation was uncertain. It would have been far more satisfactory for his arguments and for the value of his theology if he had concentrated his attention less on the sexual aspect of concupiscence and more on the broader understanding of sin which he shows in discussing the nature of Adam’s transgression itself. This was the sin of pride, and pride means the abandonment of God in order to please oneself, and thus the surrender to the temptation to ‘be as gods’ (Gen. 3:5).® The Fall means that mankind has sunk far below the level of weakness and insensibility that characterizes the human infant. The further back an arrow is pulled on a bow, the greater its velocity in the opposite direction when it is released; man has fallen into a state where his natural condition is bondage to sin and inevitable death.7 This does not imply that free will has been lost. Augustine is quite clear that human action is not determined; 1 * s 4 5 * 7

ib. 1.28-30; c. Jul. 6.49-50. nupt. et concup. 2.15. op. imperf. c. Jul. 4.104. nupt. et concup. 2.36. ib. 1.27. civ. Dei. 14.13. ib. 13.3.

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A History of Christian Doctrine

one can choose freely between different options. The Pelagians, however, he thinks, do not realize that while free choice is possible freedom has been lost. Freedom means freedom from sin and freedom for righteousness. It is experienced in, and consists of, serving God in living the life of free sons of God.1 In the fallen state man can choose, but he cannot enjoy liberty, for he is in bondage to sin and his every choice, his exercise of free will, takes place within, as it were, a bracket governed by the sign of sin.2 He is under the necessity of sinning.3 It follows that no one can pray ‘Forgive us our trespasses’ except in the straightforward sense of the words.4 5 It also follows, according to Augustine’s logic, that since infants receive the exsuffiatio before baptism they must be at that stage possessed by the devil; otherwise, if there were no devil to expel the rite would presumably be directed against God the Creator - a frightful blasphemy. Therefore, if not rescued by baptism, the infant will necessarily go with the devil into eternal fire.6 He was, however, prepared to modify his strict logic by admitting that the punishment of those who had added no actual sin to their original inherit¬ ance would be ‘the most gentle of all’.8 9 Freedom, in Augustine’s sense, can come only through grace. Grace is not, as Pelagius affirmed, given merely in the conditions laid down by God for living good lives and in the laws and other aids to the good life which he provides, but it is the internal operation of the Holy Spirit7 which makes possible both the exercise of the will and the accomplishment of good actions. God does not only give us the possibility of doing good but operates in us the willing and doing.8 God ‘prepares man’s good will in order that it may be helped, and helps it when he has prepared it. He “prevents” the unwilling man so as to make him will, and when he does so will God accompanies him with his aid so that his will may not be ineffective.’ Grace does not merely teach men what to do, but enables them to do it.® It wins victory for them in the inward conflict between flesh and spirit, and is thus different in its operation in them from what it was in Adam, for whom grace gave the possibility of not sinning if he remained in his pristine beatitude. This state, in turn, must be distinguished from the final state of the saved in heaven for whom there will be no possibility of sinning. Adam had the assistance without which he could not persevere in blessedness through the exercise of free will. Those who are elected to salvation receive the assistance which actually enables them to persevere: the distinction is between ‘assistance without which something cannot be attained' (adiutorium sine quo non . . .) and ‘assistance by which something can be attained' (adiutorium quo . . .).10 Thus Augustine lays down the classifications of 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

c. duas epp. Pelag. 1.5. cf. per/, just. horn. 9. op. imperf. c. Jul. 1.106. c. duas epp. Pelag. 4.27ff. op. imperf. c. Jul. 3.199. enchir. 23. cf. ib. 11. grat. Chr. 24-26. enchir. 9; grat. Chr. 36-37. corrept. et grat. 29-34.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

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grace: prevenient, co-operating, sufficient, efficient. The relation between the operation of grace and human freedom is that the irresistible will of God operates in and through human wills, not by over-riding them but by moving them from within so that they come to be instruments of God’s will.1 This is how prevenient grace works.2 Here we approach the problem of predestination. Some men are brought to salvation. This is not through their merits but by grace, because they are freely justified in the blood of the second Adam. Those who are chosen out of the ‘lump of perdition’ have been predestined from before the foundation of the world without regard for any merits on their side.3 Predestination signifies the foreknowledge of God and the fore-ordaining of the means by which those who are to be saved will be saved. It is by God’s just judgment that the rest are left in the ‘lump of perdition’ and either not given an opportunity to believe or, if they are given it, they are without the ability to take advantage of it. No one can come to Christ unless it be given him, and it is given to those who have been chosen in him before the foundation of the world. Those who are elect can respond to the gospel; the rest, whether they hear it or not, cannot act upon it. Perseverance is thus a gift; it cannot be meritorious, for it is given by grace to those who are pre¬ destined. Yet this does not make preaching unnecessary; on the contrary, it is the elect alone who can respond and so make it possible for the preaching to take effect.4 5 Everything from initial conversion to final perseverance is God’s gift according to the ‘election of grace’.6 Hence the question why of two infants, equally bound by original sin, one is taken and one left, or of two unbelieving adults one is called to conversion and the other not, or why of two believers one is given final perseverance and the other not, can only be left to the inscrutable judgment of God. All that we can know is that the one was among the predestined and the other not.6 The number of the elect, again, is a mystery, but Augustine believes that it is in the end to be equated with the number of the fallen angels.7 This presents difficulties in view of the assertion of 1 Tim. 2:4 that God wills all men to be saved. Augustine’s way of getting round this text is to interpret it to mean either that no man can be saved unless God wills it (and so it is right to pray that God wills the salvation of any individual person), or that in those elected to salvation all sorts and conditions of men are included, from kings to beggars, wise men to fools: so that the text really means that God wills the salvation of all the predestined.8 This attempt to push the logic of grace to extremes provoked a consider¬ able reaction in the West, especially in the developing stronghold of monasticism in southern France. The ascetical theology of the Eastern desert fathers, which was held up as a model for the West by Cassian, 1 2 3 4

ib. 45enchir. 9. corrept. et grat. 12-17. persev. 35-37. 5 ib. 47-496 ib. 2iff.; tract, in Jn. 43.13; no.2. 7 civ. Dei 22.1; enchir. 9. 8 enchir. 27; corrept. et grat. 44.

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A History of Christian Doctrine

Vincent of Lerinurn and others, rested on a concept of grace which allowed genuine scope for moral effort and meritorious progress and interpreted the operation of grace in terms of assistance. Augustine's belief that the initial turning of a man to God, the beginning of conversion, is a gift of prevenient grace and is not initiated by the human will, was sharply questioned by Prosper, a strong Augustinian in other respects, and by Cassian and others of the party called in modem times ‘ Semi-Pelagians’.1 This was a vital point, one of those on which the Augustinian idea of pre¬ destination depended. Another was the interpretation of I Tim. 2:4, which was challenged by both these writers, Cassian holding that it must be taken literally: that if God walls the salvation of all men the loss of any must be contrary to his will, in the sense that it is due to their own sin. Predestina¬ tion, therefore, can be accepted only in the greatly reduced sense that God foresees the merits of the elect and the demerits of the lost, or rather that God elects those whom he foresees as meriting salvation.2 Cassian also held that Augustine had over-stated the depravity of fallen man, who can recognize God's will, though he needs grace to enable him to do it.3 So far as the West was concerned (the East was very little affected by Augustine’s teaching; thus predestination vras denied by John of Damascus),4 it was an essentially Augustinian view which prevailed, despite the fact that such a theologian as Vincent regarded it as a dangerous innovation and in this context had formulated his famous ‘canon' of tradition: that which is believed always, everywhere, and by all men.5 This theology was summed up by the Second Council of Orange in 529. The main headings include the belief that by the Fall man was totally changed for the worse, in soul as well as body, and that Adam’s sin was transmitted to the entire race. The initial movement of faith, the wall to conversion, is entirely a gift of grace; there can be no response to the gospel without the illumina¬ tion and inspiration of the Spirit. In every good work and in all good intention it is God who acts and wills; our evil intentions and deeds, on the other hand, are our own, for lying and sin are all that we can claim as our own achievement. Grace is necessary for all men without exception; there is no merit, and, in particular, no reward for merits preceding the operation of grace, because nothing good or meritorious can be done without grace. Only in one respect does the Council’s doctrine markedly differ from Augustine’s. This is in its avoidance of any direct reference to predestination except in the condemnation of the idea that any men are actually pre¬ destined to evil by God’s power. In two of the Council’s clauses, however, we catch a glimpse of the elements of genuine religious truth which he at the heart of Augustine’s understanding of grace, distorted as they often were by his terrible conception of sin: God loves us as we shall be through his gift of grace and not as we now are through our own deserving. To love God is a gift given by God who loves although he is unloved. He loves us 1 2 3 4 5

Prosper ap. Aug. ep. 225.5-6; Cassian coll. 13.8.4; 13.11.1. Prosper ap. Aug. ep. 225.4; 226.7; Cassian coll. 13.7. Cassian coll. 13.13. Jo. D. fid. orth. 2.30. Vincent commonit. 2.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

169

although we are not pleasing to him, so that there may come to be in us that through which we shall be pleasing to him; for the Spirit, whom we love together with the Father and the Son, pours out in our hearts the love of the Father and the Son.1

1 Council of Orange (529) cap Hula (Hahn, pp. 220-227).

THE CHURCH AND THE SACRAMENTS The teaching of the Christian writers of the second and early third centuries about the Church and the Sacraments has already been briefly noticed. So far as Western theology is concerned, the most important figure in this field is Cyprian. As bishop of Carthage during the Decian persecution and its aftermath, he had to work out a theory of the nature of the Church, the limits of its membership, its unity and its discipline which could meet the stresses caused by numerous apostasies of Christians under persecution, and the consequent recriminations and disunity after peace had been re¬ stored and quarrels about, and between, the ‘resistance’ and the ‘collabora¬ tors’ had begun to cause disruption and to lead to the schism which ensued. Cyprian was an administrator rather than a speculative thinker, and his ecclesiology was hammered out in response to the practical problems which he had to solve. Cyprian’s main concern was to preserve the Church’s unity, threatened by the conflict between three parties. There were some who shared the outlook of Tertullian and held that grave sinners, especially apostates, could not be reconciled to the Church during their lifetime, some who held, like some of the confessors who had suffered in the persecution and their admirers, that the granting or withholding of pardon to the lapsed was a privilege of those who, as martyr-witnesses, had proved themselves to be Spirit-possessed saints, and some who, like Cyprian, believed it to be the duty of the bishop to examine each case on its merits and prescribe appro¬ priate penitential discipline. In trying to assert his episcopal authority in respect of penitential discipline Cyprian took care to work in close co¬ operation with Church leaders elsewhere, especially with Cornelius, the bishop who, after the cessation of the persecution, was elected to fill the long-vacant see of Rome. It was at Rome that Novatian started his break¬ away movement, having been consecrated to the bishopric in due form by neighbouring bishops, but after Cornelius had been properly elected. The issue in this schism was the treatment of post-baptismal sin. Novatian's followers held that penitential discipline leading to restoration to com¬ munion in the end, perhaps only when the offender is on his death-bed, cannot be made available for mortal sin such as apostasy; the Church has no power to reconcile such sinners, and if it does do so it becomes corrupted so that its ministry and sacraments become invalidated: for those from whom the Spirit has departed cannot in their turn impart spiritual blessing. Their view was thus similar to the rigorism of Hippolytus in his controversy

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

171

with Callistus, and virtually identical with the position of Tertullian in his De Pudicitia. Cyprian, with the main body of the Church in Africa and elsewhere, held that the Church cannot be restricted in its membership to the morally perfect. In this age it is bound to be a mixed society of good and bad. It can, of course, seek to insure itself to some extent by selecting its applicants for membership carefully. As the rules for the admission and testing of catechumens in the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus strikingly show, anxiety to recruit worthy members had led to baptism becoming more like a reward for virtuous conduct, administered after a long period of probation, than the actual beginning of Christian life which it had apparently been in the first century. Nevertheless, the Church will contain tares as well as wheat; like the ark, it will house unclean as well as clean inmates; and in this age it not possible to separate them, for at best this can lead only to more and more sectarian subdivision in the quest for a visible remnant which will be manifestly the genuinely holy Church, and at worst to an attempt to perform the impossible task of discovering and judging hidden motives and secret sins. The third-century controversy about post-baptismal sin ended with the triumph of the view that the Church may grant reconciliation sooner or later to all sinners who have given adequate tokens and pledges of repen¬ tance. Only in Africa did the sectarian ideal of total visible holiness in this present age remain a. really powerful influence. The controversy had, how¬ ever, produced the first schism which did not involve controversy about the fundamentals of belief in God, and thus it confronted theologians with the need to mark out the limits of the true Church since these were not now necessarily coterminous with the boundary between recognized orthodoxies and heresies. This became especially necessary when Novatianists made their own converts to Christianity and the question arose whether, if these later wished to join the majority Church, they had to be baptized (or, as Novatianists would see it, rebaptized). Cyprian held uncompromisingly to the strict view that there is no salvation and no Christianity outside the visible Church. Whoever separates himself from the Church and is joined to an adulteress cuts himself off from the Church’s promises. He who leaves Christ’s Church cannot attain Christ’s rewards. He is an alien, ‘profane’, an enemy. He cannot have God for Father who has not the Church for mother. Whoever is outside the Church can no more escape than anyone could who stayed outside the ark of Noah: ‘he who is not with me is against me’.1 He who is outside the Church of Christ, whoever and whatever he may be, is not a Christian.2 It follows that outside the Church there is no baptism, nor any other gift of grace. Cyprian, following the general outlook of the time, held that confession under persecution and martyrdom were the highest goal of Christian discipleship. If the catechumen suffered martyrdom his death was equivalent to baptism, for it was a literal, and not merely figurative, dying with Christ to rise with him. But for a ‘heretic’ martyrdom profited nothing, since ‘there is not salvation outside the Church'. How 1 Cypr. un. eccl. 6. 2 ep. 55.24.

A History of Christian Doctrine

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much less, asks Cyprian, could a man profit from schismatic baptism? To be ‘dipped’ in a cave and hide-out of brigands with the contagion of adulterous water not only does not remove a person’s former sins but adds to them new and more serious ones.1 The Holy Spirit does not operate in sacraments outside the Church; prayer is not heard and the eucharistic offering is not consecrated where there is no Holy Spirit.2 Schismatic ordinations are therefore profane; they are conferred by false bishops and antichrists, and the ministries of people so ordained consist in offering false and sacrilegious sacrifices against the one divine altar. Cyprian therefore directs that if schismatic clergy return to the fold they shall be reconciled as laymen, and ‘not allowed to retain the arms which they used against us as rebels’.3 Those who have been ‘baptized’ by schismatics must therefore be baptized on entering the Church. Only within it is there Christ's authentic sacrament. The criterion of ‘within’ or ‘outside’ the Church is not doctrinal but organizational. Irenaeus and Tertullian had seen the continuity of bishops in their sees in succession to apostolic founders as a primary guarantee of true doctrine. Cyprian saw in this succession the guarantee that the societies over which they preside are true parts of the authentic Church of Christ. The Church is based upon, and depends upon for the ordered process of its life, the episcopal succession. It is governed by the bishops in its every act. This means that, although the episcopate itself is ‘constitutional’, in the sense that the Church consists of bishops, presbyterate, and laity who attend and assent, the limits of the Church are defined by communion with those bishops who can show that they stand in apostolic succession, which means succession in office, and not simply succession by consecration (which Novatian possessed equally with Cornelius).4 The bishop is the key to the unity of the Church: there is one God, Christ is the one Lord, there is one Holy Spirit, one bishop in the (local) Catholic Church;5 and schism arises when there is failure to recognize in the Church one priest and one judge deputizing for Christ.6 Thus the bishop is in the Church and the Church in the bishop, and whoever is not in communion with the bishop is outside the Church.7 For the bishop is not merely the bond of unity in the local congregation. He is a member of a collegiate body: the episcopate is one corporate holding, as it were, in which each individual bishop holds his share.8 It thus serves to bind together, and define the boundaries of, the Church which is diffused throughout the world.9 Yet although the episcopate is corporate Cyprian finds it important to trace the bishop’s office as the source and guarantee of unity, not only to the corporate body of the apostles but within this to a single individual 1 2 3 4 5

ep. ep. ep. ep. ep.

73.21. 65.4. 72.2. 33.1. 49.2.

6 7 8 9

ep. ep. un. ep.

59-5-

66.8. eccl. 5. 55.24.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

173

person. Christ, he says, founded the Church on one man, Peter, and, although all the apostles were given equal authority to his, Christ arranged that the origin of the Church’s unity should begin from one man, so as to demonstrate that the Church is one.1 This idea finds support in other passages where Cyprian speaks of the episcopate in relation to Christ’s commission to Peter.2 Its meaning is, however, substantially altered in a variant version which affirms, indeed, that the power bestowed on all the apostles was equal, but that Christ established ‘one chair’, the chair of Peter on which the Church was founded. No one can claim to be in the Church who deserts the chair of Peter, and primacy was given to Peter in order that the Church might be shown to be one. It is likely that Cyprian may have seen the focussing of the unity of the apostles on Peter as paralleled by a focussing of the unity of the episcopate on the person of the bishop of Rome as ‘primus’. If he did, then, on the assumption that the variant version is in fact Cyprian’s work, he may have written it at or about the time of the schism of Novatian in order to support the episcopal authority in Rome, and deleted it in a revised edition of the treatise On the Unity of the Catholic Church after his dispute with Stephen of Rome over schismatical baptism. If so, an important step had been taken towards the establishment of the primacy of the see of Rome, not merely on the ground that the church at Rome was the church of the capital city of the world but on the Petrine claim. The possibility, however, that this variant text is a product of much later times, designed to give support to the Petrine claims, ought not perhaps to be dismissed so readily as it has been by modem scholars in reaction against earlier Protestant anxiety to reject it as a ‘forgery’. More important, in any case, is the fact that in Cyprian's ecclesiology the episcopal succession has become more than the symbol of unity and pledge of the continuity of the Church’s life and doctrine; it is now the foundation on which the Church itself rests, and the continuing life and ministry of the Church is made to depend upon it. Cyprian’s theory of the Church had the great merit of ‘wholeness’ and consistency. The Christian community was seen as the sphere of the operation of the Holy Spirit; in its life Christ was embodied and re¬ presented; its mission and worship was the framework or context of the sacraments, and these could not be conceived as possessing any significance, or indeed as existing at all, outside that living human situation. Unfortun¬ ately, what was gained by tying the sacraments so firmly into the wholeness of the Church's life was lost by defining the boundaries of the Church so narrowly by reference to the historic episcopate. For this meant that schismatics like Novatian, who fully shared in the life, thought and worship of the Christian community, had to be treated as non-Christians. This attitude was opposed by Stephen, bishop of Rome, in respect of the question of those baptized in schism who wished to join the majority church. On Cyprian’s principle, these people had never been baptized at all and must be received into the Church as though they were heathen converts. Stephen, also claiming the authority of traditional practice, held that they 1 ep. 55-242 un. eccl. 4.

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A History of Christian Doctrine

had been baptized, and that since baptism is essentially unrepeatable, they should be admitted with the laying-on of hands. The precise meaning of this rite was left undefined, except that it was regarded as an efficacious sign of the coming of the Holy Spirit on those to whom it was administered. It resembled the laying-on of hands in the reconciliation of penitents, and this may' have been, in part at least, the intended meaning: the restoration of the Spirit to those who had been outside the Church, the sphere of the Spirit. On the other hand, the baptismal rite known to Tertullian had included the laying of the bishop’s hand on the newly baptized, as a sign of the coming of the Spirit, and during the third century it is clear that there was an increasing tendency to regard the post-baptismal rite, whether of chrismation or, in the West, the imposition of hands, or both, as the sacramental sign of the gift of the Spirit. The common occurrence of clinical baptism, when the sick person would be baptized privately and receive the post-baptismal rite from the bishop at a later date, if he had recovered,1 contributed towards the separation of what later became known as Con¬ firmation from the rite of baptism proper, and also towards the tendency to exalt it at the expense of baptism which could even be reduced to a kind of purificatory rite of cleansing in preparation for the reception of the positive sacrament of ‘Spirit-baptism’. This tendency was especially marked in the baptismal doctrine of the treatise On Rebaptism which dates from this controversy and represents Stephen’s point of view. Baptism in water is there treated as an incomplete sacrament; it is of lesser importance than the laying-on of hands, and it is the latter which is the sacrament of the Spirit and of the promise of salvation.2 It seems probable, then, that the develop¬ ment of this tendency, which was contrary to Cyprian’s general insistence on the unity of the initiatory rite,3 contributed to the willingness of Stephen’s party to recognize baptism outside the Church so long as the laying-on of hands was administered to those who had received such baptism by the legitimate bishop on their reception into the Church. Stephen’s attitude prevailed in the West (in the East the criterion for the recognition or otherwise of baptism administered in schism was the degree of Trinitarian orthodoxy in the sect concerned) and came to be adopted even in Africa by the Catholic (as opposed to Donatist) Church: in 314 it was endorsed, against the Donatists, by the Council of Arles. How it was possible to combine a Cyprianic theory of the frontiers of the Church with a recognition, to the extent of believing it to be unrepeatable, of baptism administered outside them, was left undefined until fourth-century Catholicism in Africa had to justify its practice against the Donatists. The Donatist ecclesiology was similar to the Novatianist, although strictly theological considerations were to some extent subordinated to the social, cultural, economic and political factors which contributed to the rise of the movement and gave it its remarkable strength and stayingpower. It assumed that the true Church must be visibly holy, and that those who had offered less than total resistance to the demands of Diocletian’s 1 e.g., ep. 33.1; 66.8. rebapt. 5-6; 11; cf. Cornelius 3 Cypr. ep. 63.8; 69.13; but cf. 2

ap. Eus. 73.9.

h.e.

6.43.15.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

175

persecuting officials, especially those who had handed over copies of the Scriptures, must be rigorously excluded from membership. In particular, clergy who were guilty of this would, if allowed to remain in the Church, pass on the pollution; their ministrations would be valueless, their ordina¬ tions would perpetuate a succession of false priests. In the eyes of the Donatists the ‘Catholics' were a schismatic and contaminated body. Its members must therefore be (re)baptized on joining the (Donatist) true Church. Against their teaching Optatus, bishop of Milevum, argued in about 367 that the Church must be a mixed society of good and evil (here following Cyprian against those who claimed to be Cyprianic); unity and universality characterize the Church as much as outward holiness; and baptism is God’s rather than the Church’s, so that the character of the administrant is relatively unimportant.1 Augustine developed this last idea in his long polemic against the Donatists. The Church’s unity is central in his theology. It is grounded in the identity between the Church and Christ, for the community and its Lord are the members and the head, and together are a single organism or petson.2 The solidarity between the head and the members is maintained by the Spirit,3 and the manifestation of the Spirit is love. Love is therefore the essential characteristic of the Church,4 and although Augustine shares Cyprian’s organizational definition of the Church’s visible structure and boundaries he thinks of the inward operation of love as the real distinguish¬ ing mark of the Church which separates it from the rest of mankind. Schism is the negation of love, so that where there is schism there is no love and therefore no genuine Church.6 Unfortunately, Augustine could not say that where there is no love there is schism; for his definition of the Church is determined in the last resort by the nature of its structure, and so he has first to identify schism by means of external criteria and only then begin to interpret the nature of schism in terms of the inward quality of lovelessness. This, however, enables him to say that what a person baptized in schism lacks is, precisely, love. He has been genuinely baptized, for the sacraments are not the Church’s but Christ’s. His baptism is real and unrepeatable. It is ‘valid’. On the other hand, until he is admitted into the Church where love, the operation of the Spirit, is present, his baptism cannot become ‘efficacious’. It is like a frozen credit, from which no profit can be derived until entry into the Church with the laying-on of hands releases its grace.6 Thus, in his anxiety to devise an eirenic theory to encourage Donatists towards reunion, he broke through the narrowness of Cyprian’s practice at the expense of losing the ‘wholeness’ of Cyprian's theory. The sacraments are given a validity of their own outside the framework of the Church’s actual life, and they are depersonalized. Instead of being essentially means of grace, in the sense of channels of God’s gracious approach to man, they come to be thought of mechanically and impersonally. A means of personal 1 Optatus 2.20; 2.iff.; 3.2; 5.4-ff. 2 3 4 5 8

enarr. in Ps. 30.4; enarr. in Ps. 127.3. serm. 267.4; 268.2. enarr. 2 in Ps. 32.21; Trin. 15.335. ep. 61.2; serm. 265.7. bapt. 1.18; 4.1; 4.24; 5.9; 6.1, 7; 7.87; serm. ad Caes.

6.

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A History of Christian Doctrine

graciousness cannot be ‘valid’ in the sense of being the genuine article, and yet not ‘efficacious'; Augustine’s idea of baptism is closer to the notion of a cheque which can be stopped until, in different circumstances, the drawer chooses to unstop it. Augustine regards the visible Church as a mixed society of good and bad, but he is less satisfied than some of his predecessors to stop when he has said this. He realizes that sin within the organized Church is a problem, and he tries to solve it by distinguishing nominal members from the real Church which is the society of the righteous. He does not imitate the Donatists in trying actually to sort out the one group from the other; the authentically holy Church is known only to God.1 This belief in what is virtually the idea of an invisible Church only partly coterminous with the visible institution is in harmony with Augustine’s idea of the relationship of Church and State to the earthly and heavenly ‘cities’, the realms of God and of evil. The Donatists held that the Church, as the holy society of God’s people, must be in a constant state of war against the secular power, whether this be a persecuting heathen empire (which to the Donatists is almost the natural and proper relationship of Church to State) or a persecuting, self-styled Catholic, Christian one. Most Churchmen from Eusebius to Optatus and on to Augustine’s contemporaries had held that the Christian empire, em¬ bracing the Church, was virtually a mirror of the Kingdom of God with the emperor as God’s vice-gerent. Augustine, on the other hand, believed that neither was the Church an embodiment of the Kingdom of God nor was the State simply to be identified with the earthly or anti-Christian ‘city’: still less was the State to be thought of as forming, with the Church, a kind of approximation to God’s Kingdom. In both Church and State there are elements of both realms; and the Church contains members who belong to the evil sphere just as outside the Church there are those who belong to the heavenly. This thought finds much clearer and sharper definition in Augustine’s doctrine of predestination, which prevents him from accepting the naive sectarian concept of the visibly righteous Church and also forces him in theory to revise the Cyprianic doctrine, which he himself professed, that outside the Church there is no salvation; the logic of predestinarianism makes it impossible for him to deny that there may be salvation for some who are now outside the Church.2 Later Latin theology added little to Augustine’s ecclesiology apart from the full development of the Petrine theory of the Roman see, carried out by the late fourth-century bishops of Rome and their successors and formulated most clearly by Leo.3 In the East the doctrine of the Church was never itself a focal point of controversy and there was less reason for definition; essentially, the Greek Fathers’ conception of the Church is expressed in the thought of the incorporation of believers in the deified humanity of Christ, especially through participation in the eucharist. Eucharistic theology had developed in the meanwhile in two principal directions. The idea of the eucharistic rite, and so, by transference, of the 1 2 3

bapt. 5.38; 6.3; civ. Dei 10.6. corrept. et grat. 39ff.; bapt. 5.38. Leo ep. 14.11.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

i?7

offered bread and wine themselves, as a sacrifice of thanksgiving tended to give way to the belief that the eucharistic sacrifice was a propitiatory or expiatory sacrifice. The belief that the elements received in Communion are the body and blood of Christ in the sense that they are the effective sign, ‘type’, ‘figure’, ‘representation’, of Christ’s body and blood, identified therewith by prophetic symbolism, tended to give way, especially in the East, to the belief that the identification is substantial and involves actual change. Both these developments are often traced in origin to Cyprian, and this is partly, but not entirely, true. The tendencies which we have just mentioned co-existed in the Church before his time, and we have already touched upon some early examples of this. An instance of the varied ways in which the eucharist was understood to be a Christian sacrifice can be seen in the different forms in which a favourite proof-test was applied to it. This was the reference in Malachi i:ii to a ‘pure offering’. The Didache refers this to the self-offering of believers in the eucharistic liturgy.1 Justin finds Malachi’s prophecy fulfilled in the eucharistic offering of bread and wine in thanksgiving.2 Tertullian understands it to refer to the liturgical offering of praise and prayer.3 As we have already noticed in discussing Justin and Irenaeus, what would in later times be described as a ‘realist’ conception of the eucharistic presence of the body and blood of Christ characterizes the thought of both those writers,4 5 and the same is true of Tertullian.6 In calling the eucharist ‘oblatio’ and ‘sacrificium’, as he does many times, Tertullian is using traditional language which goes back to Clement of Rome’s reference to ‘offering the gifts’;6 but he adds a fresh nuance to this language when, anticipating Cyprian, he speaks of the celebrant as the ‘priest’ (sacerdos) .7 Hippolytus appears to go further, and actually to understand the eucharistic sacrifice as propitiatory rather than as a thankoffering, when, in the Apostolic Tradition, prayer is made that the bishop ‘may unceasingly pro¬ pitiate thy countenance and offer to thee the gifts of thy holy Church’.8 The Latin treatise De Aleatoribus (‘Concerning Dice-Throwers’), probably of the third century, speaks of the eucharist as the sacrifice of Christ.9 When Cyprian speaks of offering sacrifices for the martyrs on their anniversaries,10 his language might readily suggest that he regards the eucharist as a propitiatory sacrifice for the living and the dead. The context, however, which speaks of the martyrs having already won their ‘palms and crowns’, indicates that the sacrifice is still regarded as a thanksgiving in which the martyrs’ passion is linked in commemoration with the Passion of Christ which is the theme of every eucharist. In a better-known passage, 1 Did. 14.1-2. dial. 41.1-3; 117.1-5; cf. 1 apol. 65-67. 3 Marc. 3.22.6; 4.1.8. 4 Just. 1 apol. 65-67; Iren. haer. 5.2.2-3. 5 Marc. 4-40.3; 5-8-38 1 Clem. 44.4. 7 exhort, cast. 11. 8 ap. trad. 3. 9 de aleatoribus 4, 5, 8. 10 Cypr. ep. 39.3. 2

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A History of Christian Doctrine

Cyprian declares that ‘the Lord’s Passion is the sacrifice which we offer’.1 The language here is somewhat novel; but, again, the context equates the ‘offering of the Lord’s Passion’ with ‘making mention of his Passion in all our sacrifices’, and ‘offering the cup in commemoration of the Lord and his Passion’. It is therefore probable that the sacrifice is still thank-offering, eucharist in the strict meaning of the term. Cyprian also uses strongly ‘realistic’ language about the eucharistic Presence: ‘we drink the blood of Christ’.2 At the same time, however, as he maintains with such apparent literalness that the wine is Christ’s blood he affirms that the water mixed with the wine in the chalice is the Church, the people of Christ. He has evidently not ceased to think, like his predecessors, in dynamicrepresentational terms. Nevertheless, the impact of such ways of speaking about eucharistic sacrifice and such realism in speaking of the elements made itself strongly felt in relation to the Ministry. The growing tendency to assimilate the central concepts in Christian worship to the ideas of sacrificial worship in the Old Testament led to a profound, if subtle, change in the Christian understanding of priesthood, as the ministry of bishops, presbyters and deacons came to be virtually identified with that of high-priest, priests and levites and the teaching of the Old Testament about the ancient hierarchy came to be applied without hesitation or qualification to the Christian hierarchy. This tendency, apparent already in Hippolytus, was certainly strengthened and developed by Cyprian, as a study of his use of Old Testa¬ ment terms when speaking of the Ministry and his application of Old Testament texts to his theory of the Church readily reveals. The two lines of development which have been mentioned become steadily more apparent in the fourth century. Origen, in working out the correspon¬ dence between the Old Testament sacrifices and the eucharist, had already suggested that the eucharistic commemoration of Christ’s death has a propitiatory value, and thus supersedes the old sacrifices.3 In the eucharistic prayer of Sarapion the offering of the elements is a ‘likeness’ of Christ’s death and the prayer asks that the sacrifice may propitiate God.4 These tendencies are most marked in the Catecheses of Cyril of Jerusalem, where intercession for the dead (rather than, as probably in Cyprian, thanksgiving for them) is related to the setting forth of the ‘holy and most awful sacri¬ fice’.5 Cyril continued to use the terminology of ‘figure’ or ‘type’ which had been used by the third-century Didascalia which spoke of ‘the likeness of the royal body of Christ’,6 and by Eusebius for whom the bread is a symbol of Christ’s body and the eucharist a celebration of the memorial of Christ's sacrifice and the memorial of his body and blood.7 Yet he also speaks of a change effected in the elements by consecration and likens this to the 1 2 3 4 6

ep. 63.17. ep. 63.15. hom. 13.3-4 in Lev. euchol. 13. catech. 23.8-9 (perhaps

later than Cyril himself).

8 26. 7

d.e.

8.1.80; 1.10.28, 38; 1.10.18.

Christian Theology in the Patristic Period

179

miracle at Cana.1 This ‘conversion’ is believed to be effected, not by the whole action of eucharistic thanksgiving (which in early Christian thought is held to be consecratory of that for which, or over which, God is thanked), but in response to the invocation of the Holy Spirit or the recitation of the words of Institution.2 Chrysostom, too, combines the ‘realism’ of speaking about ‘a holy and awful sacrifice’ in which ‘Christ is set before you slain’ with the more precise theology of his explanation that ‘we do not offer another sacrifice (i.e. other than Christ’s), but the same; or rather, we make a memorial of the sacrifice’.3 Ambrose develops a strongly propitiatory doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice in relation to Christ’s heavenly intercession, and echoes the ‘conversionist’ language of the Cappadocians in speaking of a transformation of the elements, of their character being changed, and of their nature being altered by Christ’s word and the ‘mystery of holy prayer’.4 It is in the light of this teaching that the strength of the explicit or unspoken eucharistic presuppositions in the Christological controversy can be appreciated. Hence Cyril of Alexandria wishes to repudiate the tradi¬ tional language of ‘figure’ and to replace symbolism with an uncompromis¬ ing assertion that the elements are transformed into Christ’s body and blood,5 while Theodoret, in the interests of his argument against Eutychianism, is equally anxious to deny the idea of a ‘conversion’ of symbol into body.6 In the later stages of Greek theology, however, the duality of symbol and reality is firmly rejected. According to John of Damascus bread and wine are changed into the body and blood which are the body and blood of God the Word, in such a way as to be no more two entities but one and the same. They must not on any account be regarded as a figure of the Lord’s body and blood but as actually being this by virtue of a hypostatic union of two natures, the nature of bread and the divine nature.7 This under¬ standing of the eucharistic presence is connected with the belief that reception of the Lord’s body is the sacramental means of the grace of deification, as Gregory of Nazianzus and ‘Dionysius the Areopagite’ had taught.8 On the other hand, Western eucharistic theology remained much less uniform, and besides the ‘realism’ of Ambrose the ancient tradition of ‘symbolism’ continued and received clearer definition in the thought of Augustine. Augustine’s eucharistic doctrine, like his ecclesiology, is centred upon his fundamental belief in the identity of the Church with Christ, in the sense that the body with its divine head forms a single personal entity. The Church, symbolized by the eucharistic loaf composed of many grains, is consecrated in the eucharistic offering to be Christ’s sacrifice;9 the Church 1 catech. 22.2-3 (also perhaps of later date). 2 ib. 23.7; Chrys. sac. 3.4; Gr. Nyss. or. catech. 37; Chrys. prod. Jud. 1.6; Ambr. myst. sacr. 4.4.14. 3 Chrys. prod. Jud. 2.6; sac. 3.4; 6.4; horn. 17.3 in Heb. 4 Ambr. enarr. in Ps. 38.25; fid. 4.10.124; myst. 9.52; cf. Gr. Nyss. or. catech. 37. 5 Cyr. Mt. 26.26. 8 Thdt. eran. 1. 7 fid. orth. 4.13. 8 Gr. Naz. or. 25.2; Dion. Ar. e.h. 6.3.5. 9 ep. 54.2.

9.54

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offers itself in union with its head, or, rather, Christ offers it in himself. To communicate is therefore synonymous with 'to offer’.1 Christ’s oblation of himself is commemorated in the eucharistic thank-offering, of which an essential element is the self-offering of the Church; and the daily remem¬ brance of Christ’s benefits with thanksgiving may be called a daily immola¬ tion of Christ, since the sacrament, because of its resemblance to that which it signifies, may rightly be given the name which properly belongs to the reality signified.2 Augustine, who often follows the older practice of applying the term ‘sacrifice’ to the entire eucharistic liturgy instead of, as was increasingly the case in the contemporary East, to the consecrated elements, is also traditionalist in his general avoidance of the tendency to interpret the eucharistic sacrifice in terms of propitiation rather than thanksgiving. With this understanding of sacrifice there goes a sharp distinction between the outward sign and the spiritual reality. What is physically perceived is the bread and the cup; the body and blood of Christ are apprehended by faith. The bread and wine of the Last Supper were a ‘figure’ of Christ’s body and blood; so, too, the eucharistic bread is Christ, but it is the heart, not the throat, which must be prepared to feed upon that which is the object of faith and not sight.3 The sacrament signifies Christ; and it also signifies his body, the Church. What is placed on the altar, Augustine tells his con¬ gregation, is the mystery of ourselves. It is one bread, compacted of many grains. Wine is made from many grapes: the sacramental mystery of unity requires us to maintain the bond of peace. ‘Be what you see, and receive what you are.’ Thus the Augustiman theology of the sacraments, and especially of the eucharist, and the contrast between his dynamic symbolism and the almost literalistic realism of much that was said on this theme by other theologians, particularly in the East, already foreshadowed the controversies of the ninth and the eleventh centuries.

1 2 3

enarr. in Ps. 75.15; ep. serm. 272; enarr. in Ps. serm. 272.

187.20-21; 3.1;

serm.

ep.

98-9.

112.4-5.

Christian Theology in the East 600-1453

Kallistos Ware

V

Christian Theology in the East 600-1453 Kallistos Ware

I THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF BYZANTINE THEOLOGY The history of eastern Christendom is marked by a deep sense of con¬ tinuity with the past. In twentieth-century Istanbul the residence of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch is still called Rum Patrikhanesi, the 'Roman Patriarchate’, while the Greeks of the city continue to call themselves Romaioi or ‘Romans’. Behind this somewhat unexpected way of speaking there lies an historical fact of great significance. In the west the Roman Empire collapsed under the pressure of barbarian invasions in the fifth century, and the medieval society which slowly emerged from the ruins, while it had many links with the past, was fundamentally different from what had gone before. But in the east there was no such sudden break. The Roman Empire survived in the east for a thousand years longer than in the west: despite the profound economic, political, and social changes which it underwent, above all in the seventh and eleventh centuries, despite its progressive decline in size and in material resources, it yet remained - right up to the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 - essentially the same Empire as that over which Augustus had ruled at the moment of Christ’s birth. Anyone who studies Byzantine theology must keep this fact constantly in mind. Historians distinguish for convenience between the ‘Byzantine’ and the ‘Roman’ Empire: but there is no clear line of demarca¬ tion between the two, and the one is a continuation of the other. This element of continuity with the past is apparent in all branches of Byzantine civilization: in literature and philosophy, in political thought and law, and not least in theology. The Byzantines knew no ‘Middle Ages’ in the western sense: their approach to theology remained basically Patristic, and they continued to argue and theologize in much the same fashion as the Early Fathers. Categories of thought in the medieval west were radically altered, from the twelfth century onwards, by the great synthesis of philosophy and theology which we know as ‘Scholasticism’. In Byzantium, by contrast, there was nothing comparable to this Scholastic ‘revolution’. A western Christian around the year 1350 might read and honour the writings of the ancient Church, but the words of the Fathers came to him as a distant voice from the past: between him and them there was a profound cultural separation. But for an eastern Christian around 1350 the Fathers were members of the same world - elder brothers and in a vital sense contemporaries. The ‘Age of the Fathers’ in eastern Christendom does not come to a close with the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth century, nor yet

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with the meeting of the last Ecumenical Council in the eighth, but it extends without interruption until 1453; and even today - despite heavy borrowings from the Roman Catholic and Protestant west during the seventeenth and following centuries - Eastern Orthodoxy remains basically Patristic in outlook. ‘Innovation I abominate above all things’, remarked Emperor Julian the Apostate (361-3): and, pagan though he was, he here expressed a character¬ istically Byzantine attitude. The Byzantine approach to Christian doctrine is perhaps best summed up in the one word paradosis - ‘tradition’, or more literally, ‘that which is handed down’. The Byzantine saw himself as heir to a rich Christian inheritance from the past, which it was his duty and privilege to transmit unimpaired to future generations. This attitude of mind is clearly evident in the dogmatic decree of the seventh and last Ecumenical Council (Nicaea, 787). ‘We take away nothing and we add nothing’, the assembled bishops stated, ‘but we preserve without diminu¬ tion all that pertains to the Catholic Church . . . We keep without change or innovation all the ecclesiastical traditions that have been handed down to us, whether written or unwritten.’ The same reverence for tradition is displayed by the leading theologian of the eighth century, St. John of Damascus (+ c. 749). ‘We beseech the people of God, the holy nation, to hold fast to the traditions of the Church’, he writes. ‘The taking away of any part of the traditions, however small, like the removal of stones from a building, quickly brings down the whole structure in ruins’ (On icons, I: P.G. xciv. 1284A). St. Theodore the Studite (759-826) based his entire reform of the monastic life on the one principle that a monk must follow exactly what is prescribed in the tradition of the Fathers: ‘You shall not transgress the laws and rules of the Holy Fathers . . . but in everything that you do or say, have as your witness either the words of Scripture or the custom of the Fathers’ (Testament: P.G. xcix. 1820C). Six and a half centuries later, at the Council of Florence (1439) St. Mark of Ephesus displayed a precisely similar hostility to innovation. Opposing the western addition of the filioquex to the Nicene Creed or 'symbol of the faith’, he observed: ‘This symbol, this noble heritage of our fathers, we demand back from you. Restore it then as you received it. It may not be enlarged; it may not be diminished. It has been closed and sealed, and such as dare to in¬ novate in its regard are cast out, and those who fashion another in its stead are laid under penalty.’ (Quoted in J. Gill, The Council of Florence, Cam¬ bridge, 1959, p. 163. On Byzantine loyalty to tradition see especially J. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, 2. The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600iyoo), Chicago, 1974, the opening chapter.) Reverence for tradition, however, can easily degenerate into stagnation and formalism; and this was what tended to happen in Byzantium. All too many Byzantines of the later period are mere compilers of what others have said before - protagonists of a narrow ‘theology of repetition’ which does no more than reiterate the accepted formulae of the past. Under such condi¬ tions the ‘appeal to the Fathers’ became simply an external appeal to 1 On the filioque, see pp. 203ff. The Nicene Creed, for the Byzantines, meant the one adopted at the Council of Constantinople in 381.

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‘authorities’ and ‘proof texts’. But it should not be assumed - as is some¬ times done - that the whole of Greek theology after St. John of Damascus was of this type. Alongside the ‘school of repetition’ there were also religious thinkers of genuine originality - men such as St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022) or St. Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), who understood tradition in living and dynamic terms, as an immediate awareness of the presence of the Holy Spirit, which spoke formerly to the Fathers and which now speaks in just the same way to us. The continuity of the Eastern Roman Empire, at its best, was always a developing and creative continu¬ ity, in which conservatism was mixed with change. In the history of Greek theology from 325 to 1453, four main periods may be distinguished: (i) 325-381: from the first to the second Ecumenical Council. Doctrinal discussion in this period is concerned above all with the dogma of the Trinity - with ‘theology’ in the narrower Greek sense of the term. (ii) 431-681: from the third to the sixth Ecumenical Council. The primary centre of interest moves from the Trinity to the doctrine of Christ. These are the Christological centuries par excellence. (iii) 726—843: the iconoclast controversy. The dispute involves both the making and the veneration of images. Is it legitimate to make icons or pictorial representations of the Saviour, His Mother, and the saints? And if so, may these icons be treated with veneration and liturgical honours? (iv) 858-1453: from the accession of Patriarch Photius until the fall of the Empire. These years are dominated by two main developments: (a) Negatively, by a growing estrangement between the Greek east and the Latin west. This gives birth to a vast body of polemical writing, often superficial and unattractively aggressive in tone, but some of it raising issues of genuine principle. (b) Positively, by a greatly deepened understanding of mystical theology. What does a man experience at the higher levels of inner prayer? How far can he attain ‘deification’ and union face to face with God, even in this present life? What, in other words, are the ultimate potentialities of man’s nature, and what is implied in the fullness of his salvation? Such is the general pattern of doctrinal development in the Christian east: from Trinitarian theology and Christology, in the earlier centuries, to ‘anthropology’ (the doctrine of man) and soteriology (the doctrine of salvation) in the age that follows. As regards the last three of these four periods, there are certain wide¬ spread misconceptions that it is necessary to avoid. First, in connection with the second period, it is often tacitly assumed that all important discussion about the nature of Christ came to an abrupt end in the middle of the fifth century. But students of Patristic doctrine who stop short at 451 have heard less than half the story. Chalcedon must be seen, not as a final conclusion, but as a stage in a far more extended process of discussion; and the terms of its definition can be properly understood only in the light of the two subsequent Ecumenical Councils held at Constantinople in 553 and 680-1. In the second place, it is a mistake to dismiss the iconoclast controversy

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as an argument simply about the nature of Christian art - a dispute, that is, about aesthetics, and therefore of no more than peripheral interest for the history of doctrine. On the contrary, the dispute raises problems of a fundamentally theological nature concerning the character of God’s creation and of man’s place within the created order. Matters of Christology are also involved, and so the iconoclast controversy must be seen in part as a continuation of the earlier debates about the person of Christ. Thirdly, the developments in Byzantine mystical theology should not be relegated to the sphere of ‘devotion’ and religious psychology, and treated as lying outside the scope of the historian of dogma. The Christian east has always refused to acknowledge any separation or sharply drawn contrast between mysticism and theology, between spirituality and dogma. As Evagrius of Pontus (t399) expressed it, ‘If you are a theologian, you will pray in truth: and if you pray in truth, you are a theologian’ {On prayer, 60: P.G. lxxix. 1180B). All theology must be mystical - something based, as St. Symeon the New Theologian insisted, upon prayer and personal experience: otherwise it becomes an arid intellectual exercise. Equally, all mysticism must be theological: otherwise it becomes subjective, arbitrary, and heretical. Mystical theology, as the Byzantines conceived it, is an attempt to understand, through a personal experience of the Spirit, what it is that God has accomplished in saving and redeeming man; and as such it is something fundamentally doctrinal. In the words of a modern Russian theologian, Vladimir Lossky (1903-58), ‘Far from being mutually opposed, theology and mysticism support and complete each other. One is impossible without the other ... It is not by chance that the tradition of the Eastern Church has reserved the name of “theologian” peculiarly for three sacred writers of whom the first is St. John, most “mystical” of the four Evangel¬ ists; the second St. Gregory Nazianzen, writer of contemplative poetry; and the third St. Symeon, called “the New Theologian”, the singer of union with God’ (The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, London, 1957, pp. 8-9). With such an understanding as this of the connection between theology and mysticism, the mystical tradition of the later Byzantine world can be viewed as an extension and completion of the earlier discussions about the Trinity and the Incarnation. ‘God became man that we might become God’, said St. Athanasius [On the Incarnation, 54). The doctrinal controversies from the fourth to the eighth century concentrated more especially on the first half of this sentence, ‘God became man’. Byzantine religious thought in the nth and 14th centuries worked out the full implications of the second half, ‘that we might become God’. There is thus an integral link between Greek theologians in the earlier and in the later period: the two groups complement each other, and throughout the whole course of Christian doctrine in the east from 312 until 1453 there may be discerned an essential continuity.

II THE SEVENTH CENTURY. THE MONOTHELETES; ST. MAXIMUS THE CONFESSOR The Christological disputes of the fifth and sixth centuries continued in the Christian east during the century that followed. The centre of discussion was no longer the word ‘nature’ (physis), but the terms ‘energy’ (energeia) and ‘will’ (thelema). Does the Incarnate Christ have two energies or one, two wills or one? The political background must not be forgotten. From the emperor’s point of view, the Council of Chalcedon left much to be desired. Since Constantine’s day, a primary objective in imperial religious policy had been to preserve unity in the Church. When the emperor summoned an Ecumeni¬ cal Council, he expected the bishops to bring an end to controversy and divisions, and to find some formula of union which the whole Church, or at any rate an overwhelming majority, would be ready to accept. Here Chalcedon had not proved an unqualified success, for its decisions were fiercely rejected by a substantial portion of the emperor’s Christian subjects, above all in Egypt and Syria, who looked upon the Chalcedonian definition as a betrayal of the tradition of St. Cyril of Alexandria. Egypt was the granary of Constantinople, and the Syrian frontier was vitally important in the struggle against the Persian Empire. It was a matter of deep concern to the imperial administration to ensure the loyalty of these two provinces. Successive emperors, therefore, not regarding the Chalcedonian ‘settlement’ as final, searched persistently for some new formula which might reconcile their anti-Chalcedonian subjects. One such effort at conciliation was Zeno’s Henotikon (482). A more subtle venture was made during the reign of Justinian by the fifth Ecumenical Council (553), which sought to reinterpret the decisions of Chalcedon in terms of Cyril’s Christology. But the Christians of Egypt and Syria remained substantially unsatisfied. Early in the seventh century yet another attempt was made to conciliate the ‘monophysites’. Patriarch Sergius I of Constantinople (610-38) sug¬ gested, by way of compromise, that although the Incarnate Christ has two natures, there is in Him only one operation or ‘energy’. In 633 a union on this basis was effected with the ‘monophysites’ of Egypt. The ‘one energy’ formula was opposed, however, by St. Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem (634-8). Sergius therefore modified his terminology, though not his basic standpoint: abandoning all reference to the term ‘energy’, from 634 onwards he maintained that Christ has only one will - the view known as Monotheletism. This Mohothelete theory was supported not only by

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Emperor Heraclius (610-41) at Constantinople, but equally by Pope Honorius I (625-38) at Rome, who had in fact originally suggested the Monothelete formula. In 638 Heraclius promulgated as an imperial edict the Ekthesis or ‘Exposition' which Sergius had written, and this document was approved by synods held at Constantinople in 638 and 639. But the victory of Monotheletism proved short-lived. Honorius’ successors at Rome repudiated the Ekthesis, and the Monothelete position was con¬ demned at the Synod of the Lateran in 649 and by a further council at Rome in 679. In Africa and the east it was strenuously opposed by St. Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662), who suffered imprisonment and exile for his beliefs, eventually dying as a result of ill-treatment. Maximus was by no means a fanatic over questions of theology: for him, what mattered in Christology was content, not the words used to express it. He considered it legitimate to speak, not only of two ‘natures’ in Christ, but also of ‘one nature’: it all depends how the word physis is understood [Letter 12: P.G. xci. 477B; Letter 18: P.G. xci. 588B). He believed equally that the formula ‘one energy’ was capable of an orthodox interpretation (Disputation with Pyrrhus: P.G. xci. 344BC). When Sophronius and he opposed the theology of Sergius, it was not from any desire to contend about words, but because they believed that Monotheletism undermined the fullness and integrity of Christ’s manhood. Human nature without a human will, so they felt, is an unreal abstraction. Christ is no longer genuinely man, for his manhood has been made into a mere organon, an instrument or tool without real power of free choice - a puppet show of passive attributes, worked from outside by the divinity of the Word. Monotheletism, seen from this point of view, was a revival of the heresy of Apollinarius. Where Apollinarius denied Christ a human soul, distinct from the indwelling Logos, Sergius denied Him a human will, distinct from the divine will. The effect in either case is the same: the scheme of salvation is endangered. As St. Gregory of Nazianzus had insisted, ‘Not assumed means not healed’. Christ’s human will, like His human soul, is vital for soteriology: for the part of us that requires to be redeemed and healed is above all else our power of free will and moral choice. What we see in Christ - so Maximus argued - is precisely a human will, truly free, yet continuing in unwavering obedience to the divine will: and it is in virtue of this voluntary submission on Christ’s part that we men are saved and are enabled to make our own will freely obedient to that of God. The teaching of St. Maximus triumphed after his death and was con¬ firmed by the sixth Ecumenical Council at Constantinople (680-1). In its dogmatic decree the council proclaimed that our Lord Jesus Christ has not only two natures but ‘two natural wills and two natural energies, without separation, without change, without division, and without confusion . . . The two natural wills are not opposed to each other . . . but His human will follows His divine and almighty will, not opposing it nor struggling against it, but rather being in obedience to it.’ Among the supporters of Mono¬ theletism whom the council condemned by name were Patriarch Sergius and Pope Honorius. When the 250 years of Christological controversy are viewed as a whole.

Christian Theology in the East 600-1453

i8g

there may be observed an alternating movement as of a pendulum. Ephesus affirmed the unity of Christ’s person, Chalcedon the diversity of His two natures. The fifth Ecumenical Council confirmed the work of Ephesus; the sixth in its turn reasserted the principles of Chalcedon, proclaiming that, just as the Incarnate Logos has two natures, so He is endowed with two energies and two wills. For a balanced understanding of Christology, all four Councils must be taken into account, and each interpreted with reference to the rest. The third Council of Constantinople in 680-1 marked the end of an era in Christological discussion, much as the first Council of Constantinople, exactly three centuries before, had marked the end of an era in Trinitarian controversy. After 681 there was no further attempt within the Byzantine Empire to dilute or modify the ‘two nature’ teaching of Chalcedon. The reason was in part political: the newly-established power of Islam, in the decade following the death of the Prophet in 632, had seized the nonChalcedonian centres of Syria and Egypt, which lay henceforward outside the limits of Byzantine rule. The diplomatic motive which had led the emperors to search for a doctrinal compromise now existed no longer. But were the emperors in fact so very wrong to look for a compromise? Perhaps the theological differences between Chalcedonians and nonChalcedonians were never insuperable. Severus of Antioch and Maximus the Confessor, while using different terminologies, were substantially agreed on matters of fundamental doctrine. A solution might well have been found but for the presence of non-theological factors. In the course of controversy subtle doctrinal formulae inevitably developed into popular slogans. The theological arguments that lay behind the formulae must have been under¬ stood by very few; but the slogans, once adopted, became symbols of an intense party loyalty. By the end of the sixth century, the division between ‘Chalcedonians’ and ‘non-Chalcedonians’ was reinforced by increasing tension between the central authorities at Constantinople and the centri¬ fugal forces of Egyptian and Syrian nationalism. Part of the reason why the native Christians of Egypt and Syria rejected Chalcedon with such fierceness was that in their eyes the Council constituted the symbol of a foreign Greek domination which they bitterly resented. Today, with such political factors eliminated, the two sides have begun to draw closer together. At the conclusion of an unofficial consultation held at Aarhus in Denmark during 1964, delegates from the two traditions-Eastern Orthodox (‘dyophysite’) and Oriental Orthodox (‘monophysite’) - declared in an agreed statement: ‘We recognize in each other the one orthodox faith of the Church . . . On the essence of the Christological dogma we found ourselves in full agreement. Through the different terminologies used by each side, we saw the same truth expressed . . . Both sides found themselves fundamentally following the Christological teaching of the one undivided Church as expressed by St. Cyril.’ Three years later, at a meeting in Bristol, the two groups made a similar joint declaration, alluding more specifically to the Monothelete controversy: ‘Both [sides] affirm the dynamic perma¬ nence of the Godhead and the Manhood, with all their natural properties and faculties, in the one Christ. Those who speak in terms of “two” do not

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thereby divide or separate. Those who speak in terms of “one” do not thereby commingle or confuse . . . All of us agree that the human will is neither absorbed nor suppressed by the divine will in the Incarnate Logos, nor are they contrary one to the other.' If such agreement can be achieved in the twentieth century, why could it not have been achieved in the seventh? Neither side has radically changed its teaching during the interval. What made rapprochement impossible in the past was not primarily theology, but the political climate and the prevailing spirit of mutual intolerance.

Ill THE ICONOCLAST CONTROVERSY For nearly 120 years, from 726 until 843, the Byzantine world was shaken hy the long dispute concerning icons. By ‘icon’ or image is meant, in this context, a religious picture representing the Saviour, His Mother, or one of the angels or the saints. Statuary is extremely rare in the art of eastern Christendom, and so the ‘icons’ involved in the Byzantine controversy during the eighth and ninth centuries were almost exclusively twodimensional: portable paintings on panels, most usually of wood, or else pictures on walls, executed in mosaic and fresco. The ‘iconoclasts’ or iconsmashers insisted that such pictures had no rightful place in Christian churches or homes; the ‘iconodules’ or ‘iconophiles’ - the venerators or lovers of icons - held that they were legitimate and even necessary. It was only by slow degrees that the use of icons became established in the Church. Reacting against their pagan environment, the first Christians were anxious to stress above all the exclusively spiritual character of their worship, and they sought to avoid anything that might savour of idolatry: ‘God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth’ (John 4:24). Early Christian art - as found, for example, in the Roman catacombs - showed a certain reluctance to portray Christ directly, and He was most often represented in symbolical form, as the Good Shepherd, as Orpheus with his lyre, or the like. With the conversion of Constantine and the progressive disappearance of paganism, the Church grew less hesitant in its employment of art, and by a.d. 400 it had become an accepted practice to represent our Lord not just through symbols but directly. At this date, however, there is as yet no evidence to suggest that the pictures in church were venerated or honoured with any outward expressions of devotion. They were not at this period objects of cult, but their purpose was decorative and instructional. Even in this restricted form, however, the use of icons aroused protests on the part of certain fourth-century writers, in particular Eusebius of Caesarea (t339), whose objections are to be found in his letter to Constantia Augusta, the sister of Emperor Constantine. Eusebius argued that an icon must necessarily represent the ‘historical’ image of Christ, the ‘form’ of His humiliation; this, however, has been superseded, since Christ’s humanity has been assumed into divine glory and now exists in a state which cannot possibly be depicted in paint and colour. A painted icon of Christ, he concluded, is therefore both unnecessary and misleading. Behind this line

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of thought may be detected a typically Origenist tendency to undermine the full historical significance of the Incarnation. Objections to the use of icons seem also to have been made by that fierce anti-Origenist, St. Epiphanius of Salamis (c. 315-403): but there is some doubt whether the works on this subject attributed to him are in fact authentic. The first type of icon to receive veneration was not religious but secular the portrait of the emperor. This was regarded as an extension of the imperial presence, and the honours that were shown to the emperor in person were also rendered to his icon. Incense and candles were burnt in front of it, and as a mark of respect men bowed themselves before it to the ground, such prostration being normally described by the term proskynesis. This cult of the imperial image dates back to pagan times: with the con¬ version of the emperor to Christianity it was readily accepted by Christians, nor was any objection raised on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities. If men paid such respect as this to the image of the earthly ruler, should they not show equal reverence to the image of Christ the heavenly King? It was an obvious and natural inference, but it was not an inference that was made at once. In fact, proskynesis was shown towards the relics of the saints and the Cross before it began to be shown towards the icon of Christ. Not until the period following Justinian - during the years 550-650 - did the veneration of icons in churches and private homes become widely accepted in the devotional life of eastern Christians. By the years 650-700 the first attempts were made by Christian writers to provide a doctrinal basis for this growing cult of icons and to formulate a Christian theology of art. Of particular interest is a work, surviving only in fragments, by Leontius of Neapolis (in Cyprus), rebutting Jewish criticisms. The veneration of icons was not accepted everywhere without opposition. In the late sixth century protests were made at distant geographical extremes, in both instances outside the bounds of the Byzantine Empire — to the west in Marseilles, and to the east in Armenia. Somewhat more than a century later a far more extensive and thorough-going attack on icons was launched, this time within the Empire itself. The ensuing controversy falls into two main periods: the first phase, 726-80; and the revival of iconoclasm, 815-42. Emperor Leo III the Isaurian (717-41) began the campaign against icons in 726. His initial measures provoked a violent riot among the people of Constantinople and a rebellion in Greece, thus indicating the popular support which the icons enjoyed, at any rate in some areas. Leo attempted to win over to his side Pope Gregory II of Rome and Patriarch Germanus of Constantinople, in both cases without success. In 730 Leo held a silentium - a mixed council of clergy and laity - in his palace at Constantinople, and an edict was issued demanding the destruction of all images, whether in places of worship or in private houses. Some three years before Leo III initiated his attack on icons, about the year 723 the Mohammedan Caliph of Damascus, Yezid II, issued a decree ordering the destruction of all images in his realm. There is some evidence that he was acting under Jewish influence. Later apologists for the icons, anxious to discredit Leo, nicknamed him ‘the Saracenizer’ and suggested

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that he was attempting to introduce Jewish and Islamic notions into the Christian Church. While it is not impossible that Leo was to some extent inspired by Yezid’s example, there is in fact no proof of any explicit link between Islam and Byzantine iconoclasm. Leo seems rather to have been acting under the influence of certain bishops from Phrygia in Asia Minor, most notably Constantine of Nacoleia and Thomas of Claudiopolis. One thing, at any rate, is abundantly clear: iconoclasm cannot simply be explained away as an importation from non-Christian sources, but it was a movement that enjoyed strong support within the Christian community. Fathers such as Eusebius and Epiphanius, as already noted, could be cited in favour of the iconoclast standpoint; and the cult of icons which grew up from the middle of the sixth century onwards was by no means universal throughout the Byzantine world at the start of the eighth. If the icons were highly popular in certain circles - at Constantinople, above all among the lower classes, and also in Greece and in most monasteries - they were viewed with far greater reserve by many Christians in Asia Minor. The attack on icons reached its height under Leo’s son, Constantine V (741-75). In his personal views Constantine went far beyond the normal iconoclast position: his Christology was markedly monophysite in tendency, and he is said to have condemned not only the veneration of icons, but equally that of relics and also the practice, already long accepted in the Church, of invoking the intercession of the saints. In 754 Constantine summoned a synod at Hieria, an imperial palace close to Chalcedon; this assembly was attended by 338 bishops, and was regarded by its own members, though not by subsequent centuries, as the seventh Ecumenical Council. The bishops at Hieria renewed the condemnation of icons, but declined to endorse the emperor’s monophysite theories concerning Christ’s person. They specifically defended the invocation of the Mother of God and the saints: the saints were to be venerated, but not their images. In his persecution of the iconophiles, Constantine treated the monks with par¬ ticular savagery, for it was in the monasteries that the chief defenders of the icons were to be found. The iconoclast emperors were not opposed to all art as such, but simply to the representation of the human form in religious pictures. They were very far from insisting that church interiors should be left unadorned, with bare walls in stark and Puritan simplicity. On the contrary, they encouraged rich schemes of decoration - but a decoration consisting only of foliage, ornamental scrolls, birds, flowers, and musical instruments, from which the human figure was excluded: their opponents scornfully accused them of making the church into ‘a greengrocer’s stall and a bird cage’. The icono¬ clasts allowed the Cross to be depicted and also venerated, but they did not permit any figure to be shown hanging upon it. What they feared, among other things, was the infiltration of paganism and idolatry into the Christian community. They were archaists and reactionaries rather than innovators; their aim was to preserve, or rather to revive, the older tradition of Christian art which relied upon symbolic motifs and did not portray our Lord directly. In their secular and domestic art the iconoclast rulers per¬ mitted the human form to appear, though never that of Christ. While

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excluding all veneration of the icon of Christ, they insisted upon the display and veneration of portraits of the reigning emperor. On the theological level the leading champion of icons was St. John of Damascus. He was a subject of the Arabs, not of the Byzantine Empire, and this gave him a freedom of action which otherwise he would probably not have enjoyed. In the years 727-33, when he composed his three orations in defence of the holy icons, he was still a layman, a civil servant under the Caliph of Damascus. Though small in compass, his three orations provided at the very outset of the controversy the main doctrinal arguments on which the iconodules were to rely. Written for the most part in simple and scriptural language, they are aimed at the ordinary believer as well as the scholar and specialist. Subsequently John entered the monastery of St. Sabas close to Jerusalem, and here he composed his main work, The Fount of Knowledge, a comprehensive survey of philosophy and theology, in which he attempted to gather together in a single synthesis the teaching of earlier Fathers. [The most important section of this work is Part III On the Orthodox Faith.'] The work quickly came to constitute a standard text¬ book of orthodoxy for the Byzantine world. Its influence extended also to the west: translated into Latin in the twelfth century, it was used by Peter Lombard, and formed one of the chief sources for the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. But in his theological method Aquinas differs from John in making a far heavier use of philosophical categories. In 780 Empress Irene brought the persecution of the iconodules to an end, and seven years later the veneration of icons was formally proclaimed at the second Council of Nicaea, the seventh of the Ecumenical Councils, and the last to be recognized as such by Eastern Orthodoxy. Meeting under the presidency of Patriarch Tarasius, this council reversed the decision of Hieria, and it decreed that icons were to be displayed and venerated in all churches. But an appreciable proportion of Christians in the Byzantine Empire still remained iconoclast in conviction, and Emperor Leo V (813-20) revived the policy of Leo III. A synod, held at St. Sophia in Constantinople during 815, deposed Patriarch Nicephorus, a supporter of the icons, and cancelled the decrees of 787, reaffirming those proclaimed at Hieria. But the campaign against icons in this second period (815-42) proved less fierce than under Leo III and Constantine V. While proskynesis of icons was prohibited, pictures of Christ and the saints on the upper walls of churches were often left undisturbed. It was the cult of icons, rather than their mere presence, which was attacked; pictures which were inaccessible were ignored, for they could not easily be venerated. The leading spokesmen for the iconodule viewpoint during the second phase were St. Theodore (759-826), abbot of the monastery of Studios at Constantinople, and the deposed Patriarch, St. Nicephorus (j* c. 828). Of the two, Theodore displays the greater originality as a writer. More abstract and philosophical in approach than St. John of Damascus, he seeks to explain the nature of the icon in terms of Aristotelian thought. Once more it was a woman, Empress Theodora, who brought the attack on icons to an end. In 842 the persecution ceased, and in the following year a Council at Constantinople renewed the decrees of 787. This time the return

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of the icons proved definitive: by the middle of the ninth century iconoclasm had clearly lost most of its popular support, and although it lingered on for another generation or more in parts of the Empire, it was no longer a force seriously to be reckoned with. The restoration of icons in 842-3 became known in later years as the ‘Triumph of Orthodoxy’, and it is still com¬ memorated annually at a special service on the first Sunday in Lent. After 787 no new Ecumenical Council was assembled; the events of 842-3 were seen as setting the seal upon the Seven Councils that had gone before, and henceforward in many circles within the Byzantine Church the idea gained ground that ‘orthodoxy’ was now to be viewed as an integral and completed whole, a single unity to which nothing could be added and from which nothing could be taken away. Naturally this encouraged the ‘theology of repetition’ to which reference has already been made; but, as we have emphasized, this type of uncreative theology; although widespread, was not representative of Byzantine religious thought as a whole. The attitude of the west during the iconoclast controversy was ambiguous. The Papacy, from Gregory II onwards, supported the iconodule cause, and Hadrian I (772-95) accepted the decisions of the seventh Ecumenical Council. But further to the north, in the now powerful kingdom of the Franks, Charlemagne repudiated the decrees of 787. For this there were various reasons, not all of them theological. Political relations at this time were strained between Charlemagne and Byzantium; furthermore, he knew of the acts of 787 only through an inaccurate Latin translation, which made it appear that the Council of Nicaea was advocating idolatry - not merely the veneration but the worship of icons. Apart, however, from political tensions and linguistic misunderstandings, Charlemagne and his religious advisers also disagreed with the decisions of Nicaea on specifically doctrinal grounds. In their opinion the Councils of 754 and 787 were both at fault Hieria in advocating the destruction of icons, and Nicaea in advocating their veneration. According to Charlemagne, icons could be displayed in churches, but were not to be assigned proskynesis: his standpoint was neither iconoclast nor iconodule, but intermediate between the two. This inter¬ mediate position was upheld at the Synod of Frankfurt in 794, and at the later Synod of Paris in 825. Anxious to maintain good relations with the Franks, Hadrian and his successors at Rome made no protest against the decisions of Frankfurt, but themselves refrained from disowning the decrees of 787. It was not until the eleventh century that the authority of the seventh Ecumenical Council became generally accepted throughout the west. The controversy about icons, in common with almost all controversies in the history of the Church, was never exclusively doctrinal. Social, political, and economic problems were also involved, and these non-theological factors served greatly to prolong and embitter the dispute. Secular and theological issues are so closely intertwined that it is virtually impossible to determine with precision their relative importance and influence. On the theological level, the first point that calls for consideration is the question of idolatry. The iconophiles, so their opponents believed, were ascribing to created and material objects the worship that properly is due to God alone. A modern reader naturally tends to assume that this was the

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main argument on the iconoclast side. As a matter of historical fact, how¬ ever, this question of alleged idolatry did not figure at all prominently in the iconoclast case. The point was mentioned, but not especially emphas¬ ized, at the Council of 754; the later Council of 815 speaks of it scarcely at all. The iconoclasts were in fact far more interested in the Christological issue; and to this we shall shortly turn. The iconophiles, or at any rate the more moderate among them, were not by any means blind to the latent danger of idolatry in the popular mani¬ festations of the icon cult. But they believed that, if properly understood, this cult was in no sense idolatrous. A distinction must be drawn, so they argued, between (i) latreia, which signifies worship or adoration in the full sense, and which is to be rendered only to the three Persons of the Holy Trinity; and (ii) time, which connotes ‘honour’ or ‘veneration’ of a strictly qualified kind. When we make obeisance (proskynesis) to the invisible God, it is an expression of latreia; but when we make obeisance to the icons in church - or, for that matter, to the emperor or the local governor - we are ascribing to them, not latreia, but the time which is their due. As the Council of Nicaea stated in its dogmatic decree, icons are to receive ‘not the worship (latreia) that is due to God alone’, but merely ‘honourable venera¬ tion (timetike proskynesis) . . . such as is given to the sign of the precious and lifegiving Cross, to the Book of the Holy Gospels, and to other holy objects’, for example, relics. The reference here to the Cross is deliberate, for (as we have seen) the iconoclasts permitted the veneration of the Cross. This proskynesis of icons is constantly described by iconophiles as schetiche or ‘relative’: an icon is honoured, not because of what it is in itself - wood and plaster, paint and coloured stones - but because of the relation which it bears to the person depicted. In St. Basil the Great’s words, often repeated during the course of the controversy, ‘The honour shown to the icon is ascribed to the prototype’ (On the Holy Spirit, 18: P.G. xxxii. 149C).1 The icon, in other words, is not an idol but a symbol. As Leontius of Neapolis put it, some years before the start of the iconoclast dispute: ‘When the two beams of the Cross are joined together, I adore the emblem because of Christ who was crucified on the Cross; but if the beams are separated, I throw them away and burn them . . . We do not make obeisance to the nature of wood, but we revere and do obeisance to Him who was crucified on the Cross’ (P.G. xciv. 1384CD). The iconophiles laid especial emphasis upon this notion of ‘relative’ or ‘relational’ veneration, because (as they saw it) the iconoclast party had misunderstood what an icon really is. The iconoclasts considered that an icon is somehow ‘consubstantial’ - identical in essence (ousia) - with its original; and so they argued that the only true icon of Christ is the bread and wine of the eucharist. The iconophiles, following St. John of Damascus (On icons, III. 18: P.G. xciv. 1337C-1344A), differentiated between three distinct kinds of icon: ‘natural’ (physike), ‘by imitation’ (mimetike), and ‘artistic’ (technike): (i) Christ is the ‘natural’ icon of the Father (Colossians 1:15); and in this 1 In its original context, this phrase was not used by St. Basil with reference to painted icons.

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case there is complete identity of essence between the prototype (God the Father) and the icon (God the Son). (ii) Man is God’s icon ‘by imitation’, for he is made ‘according to the image and likeness of God’ (Genesis 1:26); but man is not identical in essence with his Creator. (iii) The images displayed in church are ‘artistic’ icons, and here again there is no identity in essence with the original; for the ousia of the original is a living person, spirit, soul, and body, whereas the ousia of the image is mosaic, fresco, wood, and paint. As for the holy gifts at the eucharist, so the 787 Council insisted, these cannot rightly be described as an ‘icon of Christ’ in either the second or the third of the above three senses, for after consecration they are ‘the very Body and the very Blood of Christ’, not just an icon of His Body and Blood. The iconoclasts appealed in the second place to the evidence of Scripture, and in particular to the Old Testament prohibition against images (Exodus 20:4; Deut. 4:14-19, 5:7-8). To this the iconodules replied that such a prohibition was necessary in Old Testament times, because the invisible God had not as yet been revealed in the flesh. But the Incarnation has entirely altered the situation, rendering possible a representational religious art. Material images, St. John of Damascus argued, can be made of Him who took a material body: ‘Of old God the incorporeal and uncircumscribed was not depicted at all. But now that God has appeared in the flesh and dwelt among men, I make an icon of God, in so far as He can be seen . . . The Old Israel did not see God; but we behold with unveiled faces the glory of the Lord as in a mirror (2 Corinthians 3:18)’ (On icons, 1.16: P.G. xciv. 1245A, 1248B). In the third instance, the iconoclasts advanced what is usually termed the ‘ethical’ argument: this was employed in particular at the Council of 815. We should represent Christ and the saints, so the iconoclasts urged, not through wood and paint, but by our lives; instead of setting our reliance on material reproductions, we ought to imitate the virtues of Christ and so transform ourselves into living icons. It is indeed essential, so the iconodules replied, to become living icons of Christ; but this does not signify that all use of painted icons is necessarily excluded. A living icon is incomparably the more precious, but a painted icon has also its value. One of the chief functions of a painted icon is precisely to act as a vivid reminder of the life of Christ and the saints, and so to inspire us to imitate them. Thus the ‘ethical’ argument of the iconoclasts, so far from constituting an objection against images, is a strong reason in their favour. The iconophiles attached great importance to this didactic function of iconography, to the role of icons as a reminder and a source of moral inspiration. Man does not learn about God through the written word alone, but through many other forms of revelation, most notably through the visual image. A picture may move his heart when words do not. Icons serve as the Bible of the unlettered: ‘What the Scripture is to those who can read,’ said John of Damascus, ‘the icon is to the illiterate’ (On icons, I. 17: P.G. xciv. 1248C). In this way the holy images are closely parallel to the Gospel: icons are the Gospel made visible, just as the Gospel is a verbal icon, and

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the Council of 787 therefore proclaimed that both the icons and the Book of the Gospels should be venerated in the same way. Icons form a part of the tradition of the Church: a man has only to enter a place of Christian worship to see unfolded before him in iconography all the mysteries of the Catholic faith. In the fourth place, the iconoclasts invoked the question of Christology, and it was upon this that the discussions at Hieria and Nicaea chiefly concentrated. Most theologians on either side evidently regarded this as the crucial point at issue. The iconoclasts put their argument in the form of a dilemma: either Christ is represented simply as a man: in that case His human nature is separated from His divine nature - which is Nestonanism; or else Christ is represented as both God and man at once: in that case an attempt is made to depict the invisible Godhead, and at the same time the two natures are merged and confused - which is Monophysitism. The iconophiles for their part denied the underlying assumption on which this dilemma was based. The iconoclast argument takes it for granted that an icon of Christ must depict either the human nature alone or else both natures together. What an icon depicts, however, is not the natures of Christ, but His person or hypostasis: it shows neither the human nor the divine nature, nor both natures together, but Christ Himself, the indivisible person of the God-Man (Theanthropos). When we make an ordinary portrait of a living person, we represent only his outward appearance - the body alone, not the soul - but this is sufficient to constitute a true portrait of the person concerned. We do not thereby introduce an illicit separation of his body from his soul, nor yet a meaningless confusion between the two. The same is true of an icon of Christ. It depicts neither His divinity nor yet His human soul, but it is still a true likeness and image of His person. Turning the tables on their opponents, the iconophiles argued that it was in fact the iconoclast standpoint, and not their own, which was monophysite. The Chalcedonian Definition lays down that each of Christ’s natures retains its distinctive characteristics in a union without confusion. Now one among the distinctive characteristics of our Lord’s humanity is precisely the property of being visible; and what is visible can be depicted. The iconoclasts, by suggesting that Christ cannot be depicted because He is God as well as man, imply in effect that in the hypostatic union the human nature loses its characteristic properties and is swallowed up in the divinity; and this is Monophysitism. In theological controversy it is a standard practice for one side to accuse the other of various past heresies, long since condemned. But in this instance the allegation of monophysite tendencies is not simply an empty insult, but raises a point of fundamental significance for the understanding of the whole controversy. The defenders of the icons saw in iconoclasm a tendency to detract from the full reality of Christ’s human nature. As St. Theodore of Studios expressed it, the iconoclast refusal to depict the incarnate Saviour implies that ‘Christ came upon earth merely in outward seeming and appearance’ (Antirrheticus, II. 48: P.G. xcix. 389D). ‘In reality they deny that Christ became man,’ he maintains, ‘even though they affirm

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it in words. For if He is man, He can be depicted: it is a primary character¬ istic of man to be capable of depiction. If, however, He cannot be depicted, then He is not man but lacks flesh' [Letters, II. 21: P.G. xcix. 1184D). In the course of its history the Church has witnessed a long series of doctrinal deviations which, in one way or another, have served to under¬ mine the fullness of the Incarnation: Docetism, Origenism, Apollinarianism, Monophysitism (at any rate in its Eutychian form), Monotheletism. Iconoclasm, so its critics believed, was yet another example of this same trend. It is in such a sense as this that the charge of Monophysitism must be understood. Taken literally, it is certainly untrue. The monophysite theories of Constantine V were not endorsed at Hieria, while the non-Chalcedonian Churches, such as the Coptic and the Ethiopian, are most certainly not iconoclast. But in a deeper sense there is justice in the accusation. When the Council of Chalcedon condemned Eutyches, and when the second Council of Nicaea condemned the iconoclasts, both alike were concerned in the last resort to defend the same thing - the entire and unimpaired reality of Christ’s flesh-taking. Icons, as the Council of 787 put it, are a ‘guarantee that the incarnation of God the Word is true and not illusory'. When St. John of Damascus and St. Theodore of Studios opposed iconoclasm, their primary concern was not to defend a theory of religious art, but to safeguard the right faith in the Incarnation. But St. John and St. Theodore were concerned to defend something else as well. Icons, in their belief, serve not only to protect the true doctrine of the Incarnation, but equally to ensure a correct attitude towards the material creation. The iconoclasts are sometimes accused by their opponents of being Manichaeans. If understood literally, this charge is even less justified than that of Monophysitism; and yet, like the charge of Mono¬ physitism, it contains a certain vital truth. Of course the iconoclasts believed in principle that all creation is God’s handiwork, and therefore intrinsically good. But how far did they work out in practice the full consequences of this belief? Behind their repudiation of icons, does there not lurk a crypto-Manichaean attitude, a disposition to underestimate the spiritual potentialities of matter? In making religious art something purely decorative and symbolic, in excluding all devotion towards the holy images, they did not allow properly for the fact that material wood and paint can serve as a channel of grace, a means whereby the worshipper is brought into living and immediate contact with the spiritual presence of God and his saints. As St. John of Damascus protests, the iconoclasts 'desire to be above the body’, and they ‘say that we should be linked to God only with our mind’. Whereas the Council of Hieria saw in the cult of icons nothing but the ‘grovelling and materialistic worship of created things’, John for his part insists on the reverence which should rightly be shown towards the material order. ‘I do not worship matter,' he says, ‘but I worship the Creator of matter, who for my sake became material and accepted to dwell in matter, who through matter effected my salvation. I will not cease from reverencing matter, through which my salvation came to pass . . . Do not insult matter: for it is not without honour. Nothing is to be despised that God has made. That is a Manichaean error’ [On icons, I. 16: P.G. xciv. 1245AC).

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By taking a material body at the Incarnation, God has made manifest the spiritual value of material flesh, and thus of the material creation in general: as St. John of Damascus claims, ‘The Word made flesh has deified the flesh’ (On icons, I. 21: P.G. xciv. 1253B). If human flesh can be redeemed and made a vehicle of the Spirit, then so - though in a different way - can wood and paint. St. Theodore of Studios went so far as to state, ‘It would not be wrong to say that the Godhead is present in an icon . . . not in virtue of a natural union (for the icon is not deified flesh), but in virtue of a relative participation: for the icon shares in the grace and honour that belong to God’ (Antirrheticus, I. 12: P.G. xcix. 344BC). The icon of Christ the God-Man is not merely a reminder, bringing the absent Saviour into our thoughts: it is an actual point of meeting between ourselves and Him, filled with supernatural grace and making the power of God truly present among us. As the Council of 787 stated, icons 'make us share in a certain sanctification’. While clearly on a different level from the consecrated elements at the eucharist, the icon is none the less sacramental: it is a visible sign conveying invisible grace. No doubt behind this understanding of icons there is a certain influence of the Platonic Theory of Ideas or Forms; but it is possible to expound the iconophile viewpoint - as John of Damascus in fact expounded it - purely in Scriptural terms, and without invoking Platonism. The icon painter is performing a task of the utmost spiritual significance. He takes paint and a panel of wood, in which God’s glory is already present, as it is present in all creation. Then by means of line and colour he renders that glory present in a manner incomparably more splendid and explicit. He acts as the priest of creation, transfiguring it and making it articulate in praise of God. ‘Through heaven and earth and sea, through wood and stone’, writes Leontius of Neapolis, ‘. . . I render obeisance and honour to the one Creator and Master and Maker of all. For the creation does not venerate the Creator through itself directly; but it is through me that the heavens declare the glory of God, through me the moon offers homage to God, through me the stars ascribe glory to Him, through me the waters, rain, and dew, with the whole of creation, worship and glorify Him’ (P.G. xciii. 1604AB). The artist is a creator after the image of God the eternal Creator: in the words of Theodore, ‘The fact that man was made in the image and likeness of God shows that there is something divine in the making of icons’ (Antirrheticus, III. iii. 5: P.G. xcix. 420A). These were some of the more profound issues involved in the dispute. The iconophile partly valued icons as a means of instruction, as the ‘Bible of the unlettered’; but it valued them far more because they safeguarded the visible and material reality of the Incarnation, and because they manifested the spiritual potentialities of the material order. It was not merely the didactic and aesthetic significance of the icon that the iconophiles were anxious to defend, but something more fundamental: the true doctrine of the Word made flesh, and the right understanding of God's creation and of man’s place within the creation.1 1 The works of St. John of Damascus should now be consulted in the critical edition of B. Kotter (3 vols. so far, Berlin/New York, 1969-75).

IV CONSTANTINOPLE AND ROME (858-1439) At the close of the iconoclast controversy in 842-3, the future outlook for Christian unity must have seemed definitely encouraging. During the controversy itself, the throne of Constantinople had been occupied over long periods by an iconoclast patriarch not in communion with the Papacy, and relations between Rome and Byzantium had been severely strained; but now peace was at length restored. Unfortunately it was not to last. In 858, fifteen years after the ‘Triumph of Orthodoxy’, St. Photius became Patriarch of Constantinople. He was the most eminent scholar of his day, an outstanding influence in the ninth-century revival of learning at Byzantium; but he has been chiefly remembered by posterity for the un¬ happy dispute which broke out during his reign between Constantinople and the Papacy. It was an ill-omened and disastrous quarrel, not so much in its immediate results - since communion between east and west was quickly re-established - but in its long-term effects: for Photius brought into the open a doctrinal question which was to remain an enduring source of difficulty throughout the centuries that followed. In the schism between Greek east and Latin west, as in earlier religious disputes, the strictly doctrinal issues were closely linked with non-theological matters. In the past this was not always fully recognized by historians and controversialists. They tended to approach the schism from a narrowly ecclesiastical standpoint, concentrating their attention chiefly upon two incidents: the controversy between Pope Nicolas I and Patriarch Photius during 858-67, and the exchange of anathemas between Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, legate of Pope Leo IX, and Patriarch Michael Cerularius in 1054. It is today generally agreed that these two incidents, although important, cannot be treated in isolation, but must be seen as part of a much wider development. The separation between Byzantium and Rome was conditioned by many factors, secular as well as dogmatic; it was by no means a sudden and simple event, accomplished everywhere at once, but was a gradual and intricate process, whose distant origins extend far back much earlier than the ninth or the eleventh century, and whose final completion should perhaps be placed as late as the eighteenth. Long before any open and permanent schism had been formally estab¬ lished, east and west had been growing steadily apart - not so much specifically in the field of doctrine, but more broadly in their general historical situation. Had it not been for the fact of this pre-existing estrangement, the subsequent doctrinal disputes would never have proved so explosive. The two halves of Christendom drifted into schism, mainly

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because Christians on either side had already become strangers to each other. This is not to say that no point of doctrine was involved in the separation; but the difficulties were never exclusively doctrinal. How did this gradual estrangement come about? At the time of our Lord, the Mediterranean world as a whole was held together by the all-embracing social and political unity of the Roman Empire. Whether they were ‘eastern’ or ‘western’, Greek or Latin, men acknowledged the same emperor, obeyed substantially the same laws, and shared in the same intellectual formation and cultural background. All this was of incalculable benefit to the Early Church in its missionary expansion and its internal organization, and it helped to maintain the visible oneness of the Christian community. But from the fourth century onwards this political and cultural unity was progressively undermined. In 330 Constantine founded a new capital, Constantinople, in addition to the Old Rome in Italy, and thereby un¬ wittingly he sowed the seeds of future ecclesiastical rivalry between the Popes of the Old Rome and the Patriarchs of the New. Then in 406-7 the Rhine frontier collapsed and the western half of the Empire was engulfed by the barbarians. Christians in east and west now found themselves in radically different situations, and this meant that they developed in divergent ways, socially, culturally, and politically. During the late sixth and the seventh centuries east and west were still further isolated from one another by the Avar and Slav invasions of the Balkan peninsula: Illyricum, which once had served as a bridge, now became a barrier between Byzan¬ tium and the Latin world. Shortly afterwards the Arabs gained control over much of the Mediterranean, thus rendering travel by sea incomparably more hazardous. Personal contacts now grew far less frequent. In the earlier period educated men were normally bilingual, but from the start of the sixth century there were few Greeks who knew Latin, and fewer Latins who knew Greek. Mutual isolation led inevitably to prejudice, ignorance, and hostility. Neither side really understood how the other lived and thought and felt; neither could easily enter into the other's viewpoint and see it from within. In the days of Basil the Great and Augustine, there had been but a single Christian civilization in east and west. Four centuries later, by the time of Photius and Alcuin, this cultural unity had been critically impaired. Charlemagne made notable efforts to restore learning in the west, but this Carolingian revival was marked by an unfortunate anti-Byzantine bias. The process of disintegration is still more clearly evident in the later Middle Ages, with the rise of Scholasticism in the west. Educated Christians of the thirteenth century no longer shared - as they had done in the Early Church - a single civilization, a common ‘universe of discourse’. In consequence of the barbarian invasions, the Church in the west came to occupy a position within the framework of society markedly different from that of the Byzantine Church. In the west the Papacy was for much of the time the one guarantee of stability and continuity in a world of disorder; and as a result immense authority, political as well as spiritual, became concentrated in the person of the Pope. In the east, by contrast, there was a strong secular head, the emperor, to uphold the civilized order

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and to enforce law, while behind the emperor stood a powerful lay civil service. Only on rare occasions was the Patriarch of Constantinople required to assume the political role which habitually fell to the lot of the Pope. Even though the Byzantine Church was capable on occasion of defying the emperor, under normal conditions he wielded an influence over ecclesiastical affairs such as few if any western rulers ever acquired. In the west the only effective education to survive through the Dark Ages was ecclesiastical - given by the clergy and intended for the clergy. But in Byzantium there was always a tradition of lay scholarship, above all within the civil service; and many laymen, including several emperors, took a lively and intelligent interest in theology. A number of the most celebrated Patriarchs - for example, Tarasius (784-806), who presided at the seventh Ecumenical Council; Nicephorus I (806—15), opponent of iconoclasm; and Photius himself (858-67, 877-86) - were drawn from the ranks of the civil service, and were still laymen at the time of their election. Such appoint¬ ments were virtually unthinkable in the medieval west. Byzantine Christen¬ dom was less clericalist than that of the west, less centralized and less rigidly institutionalized; the laity always counted for more. These differences in the social situation of Greek and Latin Christianity could not but affect men’s understanding of doctrine, and in particular their approach to ecclesiology. Such are a few among the broader factors which must be taken into account when considering the schism, and more especially when discussing the incidents of Photius and Cerularius. The dispute between Patriarch Photius and Pope Nicolas I was not initially concerned with any matter of dogma. The two came into conflict, and eventually broke off communion with one another, because Nicolas found himself unable to recognize Photius’ appointment as Patriarch. A second point of difficulty was the question of Bulgaria, which was turning towards Christianity at this very time, and which both Rome and Constantinople were anxious to include in their own sphere of jurisdiction. From the very beginning of the dispute, however, there was a serious doctrinal question lurking in the background, even if it was not made clearly explicit: the nature of Papal primacy. Nicolas, as his actions indicated, laid claim to a universal supremacy over the whole Church, eastern as well as western: Photius, and the Byzantines in general, were willing to treat Rome as a court of final appeal, but they resented the direct intervention of the Pope in the internal affairs of the Eastern Patriarchates. This problem of Papal authority was more than a matter of canon law, of jurisdiction and ecclesiastical organization: it involved - even though few if any on either side clearly realized it at the time - fundamental questions concerning the character of Christ’s Church on earth. In 867 a further theological question was raised - this time not by implication, as with the Papal claims, but openly. Photius accused the west of heresy because it believed in the double procession of the Holy Spirit — from the Son as well as the Father - and because it had inserted the word filioque (‘and from the Son’) into the text of the Creed. Alongside the filioque, certain lesser points of difference also figured prominently in the

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controversy: the Greeks and Latins followed divergent rules of fasting; married clergy were an accepted institution in the east, whereas the Latins preferred clerical celibacy; and the Latins objected to the Greek practice whereby the sacrament of chrismation (confirmation) is administered by a priest. By the summer of 867 the conflict between Nicolas and Photius had come to assume menacing proportions, but in fact no lasting breach ensued. In that same year Nicolas died and Photius was deposed - for political, not ecclesiastical, reasons. Communion was now restored between Constanti¬ nople and Rome, and it continued unbroken during Photius’ second period of office as Patriarch (877-86). Pope John VIII (872-82) did not attempt to impose his authority in the east as Nicolas had done; and Photius on his side refrained from pressing the question of the filioque. It used to be thought that there was a second ‘Photian schism’, but historically this is now acknowledged to be a fiction: Photius died in full eucharistic fellowship with the Papacy. If the conflict between Photius and Nicolas is important, this is not because it led immediately to a permanent schism (which it did not), but because it outlined all too exactly the pattern which subsequent controversy was to follow, and because it brought the vexed question of the filioque into the open for the first time. Byzantines of a later period, in their polemic against Rome, constantly referred back to the arguments which Photius had originally advanced in 867. The dispute in 1054 between Humbert and Cerularius was dominated by a matter of relatively minor importance: the Greeks objected to the Latin practice of using ‘azymes’ or unleavened bread in the eucharist, and they argued that leavened bread alone constituted the proper matter of the sacrament. Attempts were made on both sides to reach an understanding, but without success. Cardinal Humbert, who had been sent to Constanti¬ nople as Papal legate, eventually laid an excommunication against Patriarch Cerularius on the altar of St. Sophia, and the Patriarch and his synod retorted by excommunicating Humbert. These mutual anathemas, which were eventually revoked on December 7th, 1965, were long regarded by historians as constituting the ‘final breach’ between Orthodoxy and Rome, the definitive consummation of the schism. But this is to attribute to them an altogether exaggerated importance. Humbert directed his excommunica¬ tion, not against the Byzantine Church as such, but against Cerularius personally; and Cerularius in his turn was careful not to anathematize the Pope, but only Humbert and his companions, whom he declined to regard as accredited spokesmen for the Church of Rome. Humbert was in fact exceeding his powers when he issued the bull, for the Pope whom he represented had already been dead for three months; and it seems probable that Humbert had already received news of the death. What is chiefly striking about the incident of 1054 is the degree to which both sides concentrated on subsidiary issues, of no real dogmatic importance. The filioque question, although mentioned, was not emphasized in the discus¬ sions; and while the problem of Papal authority underlay the entire conflict, it was not raised directly. Before long the excommunications exchanged between Humbert and

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Cerularius were largely forgotten, both at Byzantium and Rome. Psycho¬ logically, other events of a less specifically ecclesiastical character had a far greater effect in creating a division between eastern and western Christen¬ dom: the seizure of Byzantine possessions in South Italy and Sicily by the Normans in the eleventh century (it was this, indeed, which precipitated the conflict of 1054); the commercial expansion of Venice, Genoa, and other Italian maritime cities in the eastern Mediterranean; and, most serious of all, the Crusades, culminating in the deplorable sack of Constantinople in 1204. From this time onwards most Byzantines felt a deep hostility and indignation against the Latin west; and if the beginning of the schism is to be dated to any particular moment, then the year 1204 is certainly less misleading than 1054. There were sporadic attempts at reconciliation throughout the later Byzantine period. Two reunion councils were held, at Lyons in 1274 and at Ferrara and Florence in 1438-9. On both occasions an agreement was reached, the Greek delegates accepting without substantial modification the terms of union upon which the Latins insisted. The union effected at Lyons was primarily political; at Florence, on the other hand, there were prolonged and searching doctrinal discussions, covering the filioque, the Papal claims, and also the question of azymes, purgatory, and the blessedness of the saints. Both unions proved little more than agreements on paper, and were rejected by the overwhelming majority of eastern Christendom. We spoke earlier of the isolation and mutual ignorance prevailing between east and west. But it should not be imagined that there was no theological contact at all, except on such rare occasions as the Council of Florence. During the later Byzantine period, on the contrary, there was a notable series of Greek scholars who took a constructive interest in western theology. Maximus Planudes (1260-1310) translated Augustine's work On the Trinity into Greek, and Demetrius Cydones (c. 1324-1397/8) made translations of further writings by Augustine, along with Anselm’s treatise On the Procession of the Holy Spirit. The most notable achievement of Cydones, however, was to provide a Greek version of the Summa contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas; and during the later fourteenth century Thomism became almost fashionable at the Byzantine court. Another translator and enthusiastic admirer of Aquinas was George Scholarios (c. 1405-c. 1472), also known by his monastic name Gennadius. Scholarios was the last great theologian of the Byzantine period, and the first Patriarch of Constantinople under the Turks. A number of those who studied Latin theology - for example, Demetrius Cydones - were also advocates of union with Rome. Scholarios, by contrast, although he had at first supported the Union of Florence, subsequently became the leader of the anti-unionist party; yet to the end of his life he retained his enthusiasm for the works of Aquinas. From the middle of the fourteenth century, therefore, there was available in Greek translation a substantial corpus of Latin theological literature. The Greeks had a better first-hand knowledge of Thomism than the Latins had of Palamism:1 for while the east knew about Thomas Aquinas through 1 On the theological views of St. Gregory Palamas, see pp. 219ft.

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his own writings, the west knew about Gregory Palamas predominantly through the writings of his enemies. Taking into account the various non-theological factors - the different historical situations in east and west, the mutual ignorance, the friction caused by Normans and by Crusaders - the question naturally arises: what theological ‘residue' still remains in the controversy between Greeks and Latins? Was the schism really due to a primary and fundamental dis¬ crepancy in doctrine, to a basic contradiction between two quite opposite approaches to the Christian faith? Or were minor points of disagreement exaggerated beyond all due measure because of political antagonism and ecclesiastical rivalry? Without doubt, in much of the polemic on either side there is a disturbing failure to distinguish between matters of fundamental principle and second¬ ary issues. Questions of fasting, clerical celibacy, azymes, and the like, while not necessarily as trivial as they may at first appear, clearly do not involve any point of basic theology. Such matters caused bitterness out of all proportion to their real importance, mainly because of bigotry, narrow¬ mindedness, and mutual isolation. Cut off as they were from each other, Latins and Greeks each came to regard their own distinctive customs and liturgical observances as alone legitimate, and it was all too easy for them to confuse differences of ritual with differences of doctrine. Not that such confusion was universal: at the end of the eleventh century a Byzantine writer such as Theophylact of Bulgaria dismissed the dispute about azymes as relatively insignificant, and insisted that the only genuinely dogmatic question at issue between east and west was the filioque.1 The Council of Florence also made a firm distinction between matters of faith, where agreement was essential, and matters of custom and liturgical tradition, where diversity could be permitted. More serious doctrinally than the questions mentioned above was the problem of purgatory. This was not raised in the time of Photius or Cerularius - at that period the medieval western teaching on the state of the departed had not been developed so explicitly - but it was debated in some detail at Florence. Yet even here there was no question of a direct collision between opposed theologies. It was a matter, rather, of unequal doctrinal development: the Latins sought to define and analyse, where the Greeks preferred to limit themselves to the language of the Early Church, and otherwise (for the most part) to preserve a reverent agnosticism. Thus while the Latins spoke of a ‘third place’ called purgatory, in which souls undergo expiatory punishment, the Greeks spoke only of heaven and hell; and while the Latins applied juridical concepts to the next world, the Greeks on the whole refrained from asking precisely how prayers and offerings assist the dead. But both sides agreed that it is the Christian’s duty to pray 2 Even in the matter of the filioque Theophylact was surprisingly eirenic, and he sought to transfer the whole controversy from the dogmatic to the linguistic level. The basic problem, in his view, was the poverty of the Latin language, which possessed only the one word frocedere where Greek possessed three or four terms: as a result the Latins were unable to distinguish with precision between the different types of relationship within the Trinity. In this way Theophylact refrained from accusing the west of downright error in doctrine.

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for those who have fallen asleep, and that the faithful are helped by such intercessions. There are, however, at least two points in the controversy that cannot be so easily dismissed: the Jilioque and the Papal claims. And in the back¬ ground, more intangible yet none the less important, there is a third question: the differing attitudes in east and west towards the nature of theology. To the majority of Christians today, the filioque controversy appears remote and unreal, and it is often asserted that the only serious obstacle to reunion between Orthodoxy and Rome is the question of the Papacy. The Byzantines saw things differently: in their eyes, it was the filioque that constituted the crucial point at stake. It is significant that the Council of Florence spent eight months debating the filioque, and rather less than two weeks discussing the Papal claims. Why was such decisive weight attached to the procession of the Holy Spirit? In the filioque dispute, two main questions arise, the first ultimately ecclesiological in character, the second more specifically Trinitarian: (i) Should the filioque be in the Creed? (ii) Is the doctrine of the filioque true? (i) So far as the first question is concerned, it is agreed by all that the filioque is an addition. The Creed, as adopted at the Council of Constanti¬ nople in 381 and reaffirmed at that of Chalcedon in 451, stated that the Spirit ‘proceeds from the Father’, and such is the form still used in the east. At a later date the west inserted the clause, ‘and the Son’ {filioque), so that the text ran, ‘who proceeds from the Father and the Son’. This addition, so it seems, first appeared in Spain during the sixth century, where it was intended as a safeguard against Arianism; it spread subsequently to France and Germany, being finally adopted at Rome around the beginning of the eleventh century. The filioque was retained by the Churches of the Reforma¬ tion, forming part of the inheritance which Protestants accepted with¬ out question from the western Middle Ages. From an Orthodox point of view, the Reformers went wrong in this as in a number of other matters, not because they were too radical, but because they were not radical enough. Granted that the filioque is an addition, is it to be considered a legitimate addition? Even if the doctrine expressed by the filioque is in fact true, it does not therefore follow that the clause should be inserted in the Creed; for there are many true doctrines which are not included in the symbol of the faith. The question at issue is somewhat different: can the text of the Creed be altered, and if so, by whom? According to the standard eastern view, upheld by St. Mark of Ephesus at the Council of Florence, all alterations to the text of the Creed were formally forbidden by the Council of Ephesus in 431. Other Orthodox adopt a more moderate position: they admit in principle the possibility of revising the Creed - in 381 the Council of Constantinople made many changes to the original Nicene Creed of 325 but they maintain that, since the Creed is the common possession of the universal Church, such revisions can only be made by an Ecumenical Council speaking in the name of the Church as a whole. The Creed, then,

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cannot be altered by a part of the Church acting in isolation, as the west acted when it inserted the filioque without consulting the east. This question of the addition to the Creed is therefore closely bound up with the subject of the Papal claims, to be discussed shortly. It is true that the addition of the filioque was not made initially by Rome, but by Spain and the north; but once Rome had in fact accepted the insertion, the authority claimed in its support was naturally that of the Pope. The addition of the filioque, then, raises a problem of ecclesiology: does the Pope stand higher than the Ecumenical Councils, and has he the right to revise and modify on his own authority what they have formally decreed? Admittedly, the western addition of the filioque was ratified at Lyons and Florence, and therefore in the eyes of the west it now possesses conciliar as well as Papal sanctions: but the Orthodox east does not recognize either of these councils as ecumenical. (ii) Far more intricate than the question of the addition of the filioque is the problem of the truth of the filioque doctrine as such. Two main stand¬ points may here be differentiated, the one more ‘liberal’ and the other more ‘rigorist’. According to the ‘liberal’ view, the Greek and the Latin doctrines on the procession of the Holy Spirit may both alike be regarded as theo¬ logically defensible. The Greeks affirm that the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son, the Latins that He proceeds from the Father and from the Son; but when applied to the relationship between Son and Spirit, these two prepositions ‘through’ and ‘from’ amount to the same thing. This, in broad outline, was the view adopted by the Greeks who signed the act of union at Florence. It is a view also held by many Orthodox at the present time, who regard the matter of Papal authority as the one difference of fundamental doctrinal importance between the two Churches. This ‘liberal’ position, in its most widely accepted form, can be expounded somewhat as follows. Both parties were at fault in the filioque controversy, because both failed to allow sufficiently for the possibility of a plurality of theologies. There are many different approaches to the mystery of the Holy Trinity, and no single approach can exhaust the full meaning of that mystery. The approach of Augustine or Anselm is not that of the Cappa¬ docians, but both approaches have a rightful place in the fullness of Christian thought. The doctrine of the double procession of the Holy Spirit is legitimate and even necessary, within the framework accepted by the west; but, within the framework assumed by Photius and the east, such a doctrine has no real meaning. Both west and east, therefore, went astray in the dispute, because both assumed that their own theological framework was the only one which could rightly be employed. The Latins were wrong at Lyons, and to a lesser degree at Florence, because they forced the Greeks to accept a statement on the procession of the Spirit which was framed in uncompromisingly western categories; the Greeks from Photius onwards were wrong because they treated the western approach as necessarily heretical. According to the ‘liberal’ view, then, the filioque controversy was based in large measure upon a confusion. Both parties for the most part failed to appreciate that what they were arguing about was a matter not of con-

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flicting dogmas, but simply of differing theologoumena or theological stand¬ points: and whereas all Christians must be at one on questions of dogma, within this unity of faith there is room for a rich diversity of theo¬ logical approaches. The doctrine of the flioque, then, is to be seen as a theologoumenon, acceptable in western but not in Greek Trinitarian theology. This way of looking at the controversy, however, is vehemently contested by the ‘rigorist’ party. According to the standard Orthodox view, as upheld by St. Photius in the ninth century, by St. Mark of Ephesus in the fifteenth, and by recent Orthodox theologians such as Vladimir Lossky, the filioque question raises genuine problems of a dogmatic nature, and it cannot be relegated to the level of theologoumena. Admittedly, the arguments involved are often obscure and complicated, but this is true of almost any dispute concerning Trinitarian theology. Since the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is at the very heart of all Christian thought and life, a small and seemingly insignificant variation in Trinitarian teaching can have far-reaching consequences. The filioque doctrine, many ‘rigorists’ believe, has in fact led the west to underestimate the role of the Holy Spirit in the world and has produced a distortion in the Latin doctrine of the Church. Since this ‘rigorist’ position will strike many contemporary Christians, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, as unduly narrow and bigoted, it is important to understand the arguments which the stricter party among the Orthodox have advanced in support of their views. When Photius and others maintained that the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, in their minds they distinguished clearly between the ‘eternal procession’ and the ‘temporal mission’ of the Spirit. The Nicene Creed differentiates plainly between the ‘eternal generation’ of the Son - His birth from the Father ‘before all ages’ - and His Incarnation or birth from the Blessed Virgin Mary at a particular moment in time. A distinction must likewise be drawn between the ‘eternal procession’ of the Spirit - which is something that concerns the inner life of the Godhead, and takes place outside time - and the ‘temporal mission’, the sending of the Spirit to the world, which concerns the manifestation and activity of the Holy Trinity outside itself and within time. When Greeks and Latins argued about the filioque, they were not arguing about the sending of the Spirit to the world, for over this there was no conflict between them: both sides agreed that the Spirit is sent by the Son. Where they disagreed was over the procession, that is, over the eternal relationships existing within the Trinity. The term ‘proceed’ (in Greek, ekporeuesthai; in Latin, procedere) is to be understood throughout as denoting the hypostatic origin of the Spirit, the eternal source from which He derives His being. In the filioque controversy the Greeks took as their starting-point the Trinitarian theology of the Cappadocians. The Father is the ‘source of Godhead’ (pegaia theotes); He alone may properly be termed ‘cause’ (aition) or ‘principle’ (archie) within the Trinity. Accordingly it is possible to speak of the ‘monarchy’ of the Father; and it is this quality of being the aition and arche that constitutes the distinctive characteristic of the Father. In contrast to the Father the two remaining members of the Trinity are both

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‘caused’ (aitiata). The second and third persons are distinguished from one another by the different mode of their origin: the Son is begotten by the Father, the Spirit proceeds from the Father. This is sufficient to mark the distinction between them. Such was the Trinitarian theology which St. Photius took as his basis, when he maintained that there is a temporal mission of the Spirit from both Father and Son, but an eternal procession of the Spirit from the Father alone. As St. John of Damascus expressed it, ‘We do not speak of the Spirit as from the Son, although we do call Him the Spirit of the Son’ {On the Orthodox Faith, I. 8: P.G. xciv. 832B). Within such a Trinitarian framework as this, it is not easy to find a meaningful place for the doctrine of the double procession. While Photius did not attempt to establish an eternal relationship between Son and Spirit - apart from the respective relationship of each to the Father - certain later Byzantine theologians sought to carry the question a little further. In an effort to bridge the gulf with the west, Gregory of Cyprus, Patriarch of Constantinople (1283-9), followed by St. Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), maintained that not only is the Spirit sent by the Son into the world but there is also, within the inner life of the Trinity, an ‘eternal manifestation’ (a'idios ekphansis) of the Spirit by the Son. In this sense of ‘eternal manifestation’, so they argued, the Spirit may correctly be said to proceed ‘through’ {dia) or even ‘from’ [ek) the Son. But the two Gregories were careful to distinguish this ‘manifestation’ from ‘procession’ in the strict sense. ‘Manifestation’, as they understood it, did not signify a relationship of hypostatic origin: so far as the origin of the Spirit was concerned, they agreed with Photius that He proceeds from the Father alone. Between the Trinitarian doctrine of the two Gregories and that of the west there is perhaps no basic contradiction, so long as the western teaching is presented in its more ancient form, as expounded, for example, by Augustine. According to Augustine, the Spirit proceeds ‘principally’ (principaliter) from the Father, and from the Son only in a secondary and derivative sense. Is this ‘secondary and derivative sense' of procession wholly different from the ‘eternal manifestation’ accepted by the two Gregories? In Augustine’s teaching the ‘monarchy’ of the Father is still preserved, since the Father remains the only ultimate ‘source’ and arche of the Godhead. There is a considerable difference between this earlier western view and the later Scholastic doctrine, as upheld by the west at Lyons and Florence, whereby the Spirit proceeds from Father and Son ‘as from one principle’, tanquam ex (or ah) uno principio. This Scholastic theory, in contrast to that of Augustine, no longer affirms a personal principle of unity in the Godhead; the source of unity is now the divine essence, and the Cappadocian notion of the Father’s ‘monarchy’ is abandoned. The difference in teaching between Augustine and the Scholastics is probably greater than that between Augustine and the Cappadocians. If we take as our standard of western Trinitarian teaching, not Lyons and Florence, but Augustine’s work On the Trinity, then it is far easier to treat the filioque question as a matter of alternative, theologoumena and not a dogmatic conflict. Despite

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their avowed aim to promote Christian unity, the Councils of Lyons and Florence served rather to crystallize western teaching on the Trinity in a Scholastic form that the east was bound to find uncongenial. Against the Latin doctrine of the filioque, Photius advanced three main arguments: (i) The filioque implies that there are two ‘causes' or ‘principles’ in the Godhead, thus introducing a ‘Manichaean’ division into the doctrine of the Trinity and so leading to ditheism. (ii) Supporters of the filioque understand the Trinity in terms of a Neoplatonic ‘scale of being’: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are ranged in a descending order, the Spirit being one degree further removed from the Father than is the Son. (iii) If the Latins deny that there are two principles in the Trinity [see point (i)], then in seeking to avoid the stigma of ditheism they fall into a type of ‘semi-Sabellianism’. For they affirm that Father and Son, in their relation to the Spirit, are to be regarded as a single cause and arche. What is properly the distinctive characteristic of the Father - that of acting as the sole source within the Trinity — is thus ascribed to the Son as well; and in this way the Latins, like Sabellius, merge and confuse the persons. The first of these three arguments is the least serious, for both at Lyons and Florence it was most carefully stated that there are not two archai within the Trinity but only one, because the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son ‘as from one principle’. The second argument is more weighty, and in one form or another it has continued to be used by the ‘rigorist’ party up to the present day. The third is perhaps the most serious of all: Photius only mentions it briefly in his letter of 867, but it is developed at length in the Mystagogia, a work of his old age written after 883, when he had come to possess a far closer knowledge of Latin theology. Combining the second and third arguments of Photius, we may state the ‘rigorist’ case as follows. The Latins, while affirming the divinity of the Spirit, have failed to appreciate sufficiently His distinct personality. As a result of the filioque, they have tended to treat the Spirit as a function and instrument of the Son, and not as a sovereign and co-equal hypostasis in His own right. This has meant that inadequate attention is paid in western thought to the work of the Spirit in the world, in the life of the Church, in the daily experience of each Christian. The living and immediate presence of the Spirit has been too much forgotten, and so the Pope has come to be regarded as the ‘vicar’ of an absent Christ, while the Church has come to be understood predominantly in terms of earthly power and jurisdiction, and not in terms of divine grace and of a free and direct encounter with God in the Spirit. The filioque, so the ‘rigorists’ maintain, is a symptom of a wider defect in Latin Trinitarian thought. The west has overemphasized the unity of substance within the Trinity, and has not underlined adequately the distinction between the persons. In medieval Scholastic theology God is envisaged too little in concrete and personalist terms, and too much as an abstract essence in which various relationships are distinguished. The Thomist view, whereby ‘the person is the relation’ (persona est relatio), has

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led to an impoverishment in the western understanding of the personal nature of God. The greatest care must of course be taken to hedge about these general charges with the necessary qualifications. They do not apply in the same measure to every writer without exception in the medieval west. If the followers of Thomas Aquinas can with some justification be accused of allowing the common essence within the Trinity to overshadow the three persons, such a criticism is far less applicable to (for example) Richard of St. Victor (11173). Compared with the filioque controversy, the dispute about the Papal claims involves issues that are comparatively clear and straightforward. The Byzantines believed that the highest visible authority in the Church was the Ecumenical Council; and next to the Council they honoured the ‘pentarchy’ or system of five Patriarchates - in order of precedence, Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Until the disagree¬ ment over the filioque, they looked on Rome as constituting, more clearly than any other apostolic see, the norm of doctrinal orthodoxy. But the Pope, in their view, had no right to decide disputed questions of doctrine by himself: this could only be done through a consensus of all five Patriarchs, or if necessary through the convening of a council representing the Church as a whole. The Byzantines acknowledged the Pope as senior hierarch in the Church and at times they seem to have ascribed to him - although the evidence is often ambiguous - something more definite than a mere primacy of honour; but they never attributed to him an unlimited supremacy of power and universal jurisdiction, such as Nicolas I and many of his successors claimed. As Bessarion, Archbishop of Nicaea and later Cardinal, expressed it at the Council of Florence, before he acceded to the full Roman position: ‘Indeed, we are not ignorant of the rights and privileges of the Roman Church; but we know also the limits set to these privileges . . . No matter how great the Roman Church is, it is notwithstanding less than an Ecumenical Council and the universal Church ’(quoted in J. Gill, Personalities of the Council of Florence and Other Essays, Oxford, 1964, p. 267). Up to the tenth century, appeals from the east to Rome were an accepted, though never a very common, practice. St. Athanasius and St. John Chrysostom had both made notable appeals to Rome in the earlier period. During the iconoclast controversy St. Theodore of Studios recommended the emperor to consult Rome: ‘If there is anything in the Patriarch’s reply about which you feel doubt or disbelief . . . you may ask the Elder Rome for clarification, as has been the practice from the beginning according to inherited tradition’ (Letters, II. 86: P.G. xcix. 1332A). In 861 St. Photius willingly submitted the disputed question of his appointment as Patriarch to the arbitration of a council over which the Papal legates presided. But the Byzantines felt free to reject a Roman decision when they disagreed with it: this happened, for example, in 906 when Pope Sergius III gave a ruling in favour of fourth marriages, which was not accepted at Constanti¬ nople. ‘Rome was a convenient court of reference, an umpire at a distance from the capital, but in no serious sense a juridical superior of the

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Patriarchate’ (G. Every, The Byzantine Patriarchate, London, 1962, p. 168). The Byzantines believed that it was by no means impossible for the Pope to err in matters of the faith; and most of them considered that he had in fact done so over the filioque. In such a situation he forfeited his position of primacy. ‘As long as the Pope observes due order and remains in the truth,’ stated Nilus Cabasilas, Archbishop of Thessalonica (11363), ‘he preserves the first place which belongs to him by right; he is the head of the Church and supreme pontiff, the successor of Peter and of all the apostles; all must obey him and treat him with complete respect. But if he departs from the truth and refuses to return to it, he deserves condemnation’ (On the Primacy of the Pope: P.G. cxlix. 728D-729A). Underlying these two matters of the filioque and the Papal claims, there is a third point of variance, far less precise and definite. East and west, at any rate during the later Byzantine period, had different ideas about the nature of theology, about the way in which religious thinking should be carried on, and in particular about the place of juridical categories and of logical inference in an exposition of the faith. To take in order these two questions of legalism and rationalism: eastern Christians have long felt, in the first place, that Latin theology is too juridical, too much influenced by the notions of Roman law. In the words of a recent Orthodox writer, ‘One of the features which distinguishes our theology from that of the Catholics is this - it does not look at things legalistically, but in terms of God’s grace’ (Alexander Elchaninov, The Diary of a Russian Priest, London, 1967, p. 54). It is this legalistic approach, so Eastern Orthodoxy believes, which has led the west to misunderstand the true nature of Papal primacy: Rome attempted to turn her ‘presidency of love’ (St. Ignatius of Antioch’s phrase) into a juridical supremacy of power and outward authority. The same question of juridical concepts also lies behind the dispute about purgatory: where the medieval west thought predominantly in legalistic terms, of an established measure of punishment which man must undergo either in this life or the next, the east thought rather in terms of the soul’s capacity to enjoy the vision and glory of God. Juridical concepts form the basis likewise of the Latin doctrine of indulgences and the treasury of merits, and also of the medieval doctrine of the atonement, from Anselm’s treatise Cur Deus Homo (Why did God become man?) onwards. In all these matters, it is not so much this or that specific point in the Latin teaching to which the east objects: it is the general approach and manner of posing the question which Orthodoxy finds unacceptable. The Greek east has always been reluctant to speak about the nature of the Church, the redemption of man, or the communion of saints in this strongly juridical way. The Greeks felt, in the second place, that Latin Scholastic theology had become altogether too rationalistic and philosophical, too much dependent on purely human methods of argument. Despite its heavy debt to the philosophers, Greek theology never used philosophical forms of thought as unreservedly as did Aquinas and the Schoolmen. Since the fourteenth century, if not before, many Orthodox have seen, in this western rationaliz¬ ing tendency, a root cause of the schism between east and west. In the

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words of a Russian writer of the last century, Ivan Kireevsky, 'Rome preferred the abstract syllogism to sacred tradition, which is the expression of the common mind of the whole Christian world, and in which that world coheres as a living and indissoluble unity. This exaltation of the syllogism over tradition was in fact the sole basis for the rise of a separate and independent Rome . . . Rome left the Church because she desired to intro¬ duce into the faith new dogmas, unknown to sacred tradition, dogmas which were by nature the accidental products of western logic’ (Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, Vol. I, Moscow, 1911, p. 226). Kireevsky has here stated - albeit in a somewhat stark and oversimplified form - a view which many eastern Christians share. The Greeks' reserve towards ‘western logic’, and their appeal to ‘sacred tradition’ rather than the ‘abstract syllogism’, are clearly seen at the Council of Florence. When the Latins invoked the authority of Aristotle, an eastern delegate exclaimed impatiently, ‘What about Aristotle, Aristotle? A fig for your fine Aristotle!’ And when asked whose authority he recognized, he replied, ‘St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Basil, Gregory the Theologian; a fig for your Aristotle, Aristotle’ (J. Gill, The Council of Florence, p. 227). The Greeks, as we have already emphasized, had never ceased to theologize in the Patristic fashion: their criterion was always ‘Holy Tradition’ - the Fathers and the Councils - and they remained profoundly suspicious of the syllogistic reasoning in which the Latin Scholastics delighted. Even the humanist Bessarion wrote: ‘The words of the Fathers by themselves alone are enough to solve every doubt and to persuade every soul. It was not syllogisms or probabilities or arguments that convinced me, but the bare words of the Fathers’ (.Letter to Alexios Lascaris, P.G. clxi. 360B: in Gill, The Council of Florence, p. 227). In Greek eyes, Latin religious thought was altogether too confident, and insufficiently sensitive to the limitations of religious language. The Latins, so the Byzantines felt, had attempted to make theology too ‘scientific’ and philosophical, as if the realities with which it deals were accessible to ordinary human reasoning; whereas theology should be above all else ‘mystical’, for it is concerned with a mystery that surpasses all scientific reasoning and human understanding. There was of course no lack of mystical writers in the west during the later Middle Ages, but between them and the theology of the Schools there was normally a great gulf set; and it was precisely this that made the Byzantines uneasy. In Latin Scholastic theology, so it seemed to the Byzantines, everything was cut down to size, analysed and classified according to man-made categories: the sense of mystery was lost. What is here involved, of course, is not a precise and sharply distinguished conflict in dogma between east and west, but rather a difference in emphasis and broader attitude; nor is it easy to summarize that difference without distorting its true nature. Nevertheless, a difference in approach to theology does certainly exist - a difference which colours the whole range of religious thought and which undoubtedly contributed to the separation. No one today disputes the important part played, in the evolution of the schism, by cultural, political, and personal factors. Yet when full account

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has also been taken of the filioque controversy, of the disagreement about Papal authority, and of the differing attitudes towards the nature of theology, it becomes clear that the schism has also a spiritual and doctrinal aspect. Even if the doctrinal divergences were never as great as most Byzantines imagined, yet they existed and cannot be ignored.

V MYSTICAL THEOLOGY: ST. SYMEON THE NEW THEOLOGIAN AND THE HESYCHASTS It was during the fourteenth century - precisely at a time when, in the west, the gulf was widening between the mystics and the theologians - that the Byzantine tradition of mystical theology came to its fullest development. But the foundations of this tradition had already been laid long before, by Origen in the third century and by St. Gregory of Nyssa and Evagrius of Pontus in the fourth. Other writers who exercised a decisive influence on Byzantine mystical theology were the unknown author of the Macarian Homilies (late fourth-early fifth century), St. Diadochus of Photike (mid fifth century), St. ‘Dionysius Areopagita’ (late fifth-early sixth century), St. Maximus the Confessor, and St. Isaac of Nineveh, also known as Isaac the Syrian (late seventh century). In this developing tradition, three points are of especial significance. (i) First, Greek spiritual writers laid great emphasis upon the ‘otherness’ of God. Reacting strongly against Eunomius, who claimed that the divine essence is as comprehensible to man as it is to God Himself, the Cappa¬ docians insisted upon the radical unknowability of God. At the most, St. Gregory of Nyssa argued, we can be aware of God’s presence, but never of His essence. ‘The true knowledge and the true vision of what we seek,’ he wrote, ‘consist precisely in this - in not seeing: for what we seek transcends all knowledge, and is everywhere cut off from us by the darkness of incomprehensibility' {On the life of Moses, P.G. xliv. 377A: ed. JaegerMusurillo, p. 87). The mystical vision of God is a vision not only of His immanence but of His transcendence and infinity: at the very moment when we are brought face to face with God, we realize as we never did before how profoundly He is still hidden from us. Holding as they did this notion of the unknowability of God, the Greek Fathers, in common with many religious thinkers of the present day, were sharply conscious of the limitations of theological discourse. ‘No theological expression,’ said St. Basil the Great, ‘can adequately express the meaning of the speaker . . . Our intellect is weak, and our tongue is weaker still' (.Letter 7: P.G. xxxii. 345A). The Christian faith is fundamentally a mystery, and our doctrinal formulations are no more than signposts on a path of initiation. In this connection, St. Dionysius distinguished two contrasting methods of theology: the way of affirmation (cataphatic or affirmative theology) and the way of negation (apophatic or negative theology). Cataphatic theology consists in saying what God is: that He exists, that He is good, wise, loving, and the like. Such statements are true as far as they go, but they fall far short of expressing the full reality of God; for

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God is not an object that ‘exists’ in the same way as other objects, nor is He ‘good’, ‘wise’, and ‘loving’ exactly in our sense of these terms. Cataphatic theology is therefore gravely insufficient, and must always be corrected by the use of apophatic approach. Every time we make an affirmative state¬ ment about God, we must also make a corresponding negative statement, ‘for God is neither being . . . nor deity nor goodness nor spirit, as we know these things’ (Dionysius, Mystical Theology, 5: P.G. iii. 1047A). The way of negation is definitely superior to the way of affirmation: since God is fundamentally unknowable, we come closer to the truth when saying what He is not than when saying what He is. Nor is this all. Apophatic theology, by its rejection of human images and concepts, enables man’s mind to transcend its normal modes of reasoning, and to attain an unmediated experience of God on a level beyond all words and thought. So apophaticism is not merely negative, but forms a prelude to mystical union. This brings us to the second point. (2) Alongside the emphasis upon the transcendence and otherness of God, Greek mystical theology insists also upon the possibility of a real and unmediated union with the deity. To describe this union, Greek writers - in common with mystics of many other traditions, both Christian and nonChristian - use two symbols, contrasting but not contradictory: the symbol of darkness and the symbol of light. Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius are the chief ‘darkness mystics’ of the Christian East: Gregory refers, as we have seen, to the ‘darkness of incomprehensibility’, while Dionysius speaks of ‘entering into the truly mystical darkness of unknowing’ (Mystical Theology, 1: P.G. iii. 1001 A). Most Greek writers, however, are ‘mystics of light’: Origen, Evagrius, and the Macarian Homilies, and at a later date Symeon the New Theologian and Gregory Palamas, all belong to the ‘school’ of light. The difference between the two ‘schools’ of light and darkness must not, of course, be exaggerated: the divine darkness of which Gregory and Dionysius speak is a ‘radiant’ or ‘dazzling’ darkness, due not to the absence but to the superabundance of light. (3) On the practical level, Greek spiritual writers recommend one way of prayer above all others, as a means of approach to the unknowable yet ever-present God: the continual recitation of the Jesus Prayer, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me’ (this is the standard formula, but there are a number of variants). A ‘spirituality of the Name of Jesus’ is already apparent in the writings of Diadochus; what we have termed the ‘standard formula’ is first found in a text of the sixth or seventh century, the Life of Abba Philemon. In the course of time - certainly not later than the thirteenth century, and perhaps considerably earlier — a ‘physical method' was recommended, as an aid to concentration when reciting the prayer: head bowed, chin resting on the chest, eyes fixed on the place of the heart, and breathing carefully regulated. This bodily technique never constituted an essential and primary element in the recitation of the Jesus Prayer, but was regarded simply as a useful accessory. Such are the three themes which predominate in the Greek mystical tradition: a stress on the unknowability of God, and on apophatic theology; a belief in the possibility of direct union with God, this experience being

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A History of Christian Doctrine

envisaged sometimes as an entry into divine darkness, but more often as a vision of divine light; and a widespread employment of the Jesus Prayer, at times accompanied by the ‘physical method’. It is the second of these three themes that is particularly evident in the writings of St. Symeon the New Theologian. More emphatically, perhaps, than any other Byzantine writer, he insisted upon the need for an unmediated awareness of the Holy Spirit, a direct union with God. ‘Mystical experience’, in his eyes, was not reserved for a privileged elite, but should be the conscious goal of all Christians alike. Like the author of the Macarian Homilies, Symeon is emphatically a ‘mystic of light’. The theme of ‘immaterial light’, of ‘uncreated and invisible fire’, recurs unceasingly throughout his works. The divine and uncreated light, as Symeon understood it, is not merely symbolical and imaginary, but an existent reality; though immaterial, it is not just inward and intellectual, but something which a man may on occasion perceive through his bodily eyes. Here, for example, is a description of the vision which Symeon received as a young man, before he had become a monk. He speaks of himself in the third person: ‘While he was standing one night and saying the prayer, “God be merciful to me a sinner’’ - more with his mind than with his lips - a divine splendour suddenly appeared in abundance from above and filled the whole place. When this happened, the young man was no longer aware, but forgot, whether he was in a house or under a roof: for he saw nothing but light on every side, and he did not even know if he was standing on the ground. Yet he was not in any fear of falling, for he did not think at all about the world, nor about any of the cares which normally absorb men's attention while they are in the body. But he was wholly united with immaterial light and, so it seemed, he had himself become light. Then he forgot all the world, and was filled with tears and unutterable joy and exultation’ (Catechesis 22: edited by B. Krivocheine, Sources chretiennes, vol. 104, p. 372). But, vitally important though the vision of the divine and uncreated light is in Symeon’s teaching, he does not regard it as the supreme end of the mystical experience. What matters primarily is not the vision of light in itself, but He who appears and speaks to us in the light. It is not enough simply to behold the light; we must also meet Christ face to face within the light. We must hear Him speak and in our turn reply, ‘as a friend talking with his friend’, to use Symeon’s phrase. In contrast to certain authors in the Greek mystical tradition, such as Evagrius, Symeon is always strongly Christocentric. Unlike Evagrius once more, he is also profoundly sacra¬ mental in outlook, and underlines the cardinal importance of the eucharist. The mystical life, for Symeon, is life in Christ and life in the sacraments. Along with earlier Greek authors, Symeon envisages the ultimate aim of the Christian life in terms of theosis or ‘deification’. Quoting a saying of St. Gregory of Nazianzus, he writes: ‘God is joined in unity with those who are god and is known by them’ (Theological, Gnostic, and Practical Chapters, III. 21: edited by J. Darrouzes, Sources chretiennes, vol. 51, p. 86). Like can only be known by like: if man is truly to know God, he must himself become a ‘created god’ — he must strive to become by grace what God is by nature.

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The tradition of mystical theology, of which Symeon is such an outstand¬ ing representative, came to full development with the Hesychast movement of the fourteenth century. Between Symeon and the fourteenth-century Hesychasts there is one obvious point of contrast: Symeon nowhere speaks of the Jesus Prayer, whereas in later Hesychast spirituality the invocation of the Name occupies a central place. The term ‘Hesychast' denotes in general anyone who desires hesychia, that is, inward quiet or stillness: a Hesychast, then, is one who withdraws from worldly distractions and seeks God through wordless prayer. In practice, however, the term is normally employed in a more restricted sense, being used to describe a group of Byzantine writers in the fourteenth century, and their followers in more recent times. Within this group two figures are of special importance: St. Gregory of Sinai (1255-1346) and St. Gregory Palamas. The former was primarily a spiritual director, giving advice about the practice of prayer; the latter was more explicitly a theologian, and it was his achievement to provide a firm dogmatic basis for Hesychasm, which he integrated within the system of Christian doctrine as a whole. This task Palamas undertook in response to a specific challenge. During 1337 and the years following, the whole mystical tradition, which has been outlined above, came under violent attack from a learned Greek, Barlaam the Calabrian. Although by origin from Italy, Barlaam was not at the outset particularly Papalist or pro-Latin: he regarded himself as a faithful son of the Orthodox Church, but he was at the same time a ‘humanist' in approach, deeply imbued with that new spirit already abroad in the west, which was soon to lead to the Italian renaissance. In his intellectual outlook he was a Nominalist and an anti-Thomist.1 He owed much to the writings of Dionysius, but interpreted them in a one-sided fashion. Advocating a type of ‘Christian agnosticism', he pressed the traditional doctrine of divine transcendence to extremes. His attack on the Hesychasts comprised two main points: (i) Since God can only be known indirectly (so he argued), the Hesychasts are wrong to claim a direct experience of the deity and an immediate union with Him. The light which they behold in prayer, so far from being divine and uncreated, is merely a created light. (ii) The physical method of prayer employed by the Hesychasts is grossly superstitious: they are omphalopsychoi, people who believe that the soul resides in the navel. In both cases, Barlaam was attacking what he felt to be the materialism of the Hesychasts: their claim to see the divine light - that is, God Himself through their physical eyes; and their claim to harness the body in the work of prayer. The issues which Barlaam raised have an interest far beyond the immediate context of the Hesychast controversy, and questions of an allembracing significance are evidently involved: In what way is God revealed? How can He be known? What is the relation of creature to Creator? Wdiat was St. Gregory’s answer? As regards the first point in Barlaam's attack, Palamas agreed with his opponent that God is by nature unknow1 Such is the view of J. Meyendorff in his major work, A Study of Gregory Palamas. But Barlaam’s philosophical background requires further study.

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able. No less than Barlaam, he was a convinced upholder of the Greek apophatic tradition, and he honoured the Dionysian writings, which - in common with all Byzantine and western writers of this period - he con¬ sidered to be the work of St. Paul’s disciple (Acts 17:34). In typically Dionysian language, Palamas speaks of the deity as ‘superessential’ (hyperousios) and ‘more than God’ (hypertheos), and he underlines the radical distinction between creature and Creator: ‘How can we come close to God? By drawing near to His nature? But no single thing of all that is created has or ever will have even the slightest communion with the supreme nature, or nearness to it’ (Chapters, 78: P.G. cl. 1176C). While many western theologians have characterized God as ‘pure being’, in Gregory’s view neither this nor any other mental category can properly be applied to the Godhead. ‘He is being and not being,’ Gregory writes; ‘He is everywhere and nowhere; He has many names and cannot be named; He is both in perpetual movement and immovable; He is absolutely everything and nothing of that which is’ (Apology, quoted in J. Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, London, 1964, p. 209). Thus far there is agreement between Barlaam and Gregory: God is unknowable. But while Barlaam stopped short at the divine unknowability, Gregory went a step further. To maintain that all our knowledge of God is merely indirect and symbolical, so Gregory argued, is to reduce the Christian believer to the level of the pagan Greek philosopher; it is to take no account of the Incarnation, of the Church and the sacraments. The coming of Christ on earth and the sending of the Spirit at Pentecost have entirely transformed the relationship between God and man. This is a point of crucial significance for Gregory, and he returns to it repeatedly. The ‘unknown’ and ‘hidden’ God, without ceasing to be unknown and hidden, has at the same time revealed Himself in Christ Jesus His Son; and through the Holy Spirit all men may experience that self-revelation directly and immediately. As members of Christ’s Body through baptism, as com¬ municants in His flesh and blood through the eucharist, we come to enjoy an intimate and unmediated relation with God such as is not accessible to the pagan thinker. Barlaam’s notion of the knowledge of God is funda¬ mentally Neoplatonist; Gregory’s notion, like that of St. Symeon the New Theologian, is Christocentric and sacramental. God, then, is radically transcendent yet truly immanent; He is the ‘wholly other’, yet man can meet Him face to face; He is infinitely remote, yet closer to us than our own soul. In St. Paul’s phrase, God is both ‘unknown yet well known’ (2 Corinthians 6:9). As St. Gregory Palamas put it, ‘The saints possess knowledge of God, but they possess it in an incom¬ prehensible fashion’ (Triads in defence of the Holy Hesychasts, I. 3. 17: edited by J. Meyendorff, Louvain, 1959, vol. I, p. 145). To safeguard the two aspects of this saving paradox, Gregory differentiated between the essence and the energies of God. The essence signifies God as He is in Himself; the energies signify God in His activity towards the creation. The divine essence, so Gregory believed, is known to none save the three persons of the Trinity: it is unknown both to angels and to men, and will necessarily remain unknown, not only in this present age but in the age to come. But

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God’s energies fill all the world, and all who so desire may participate in them. These energies are divine and uncreated: they are not something that exists apart from God, not a gift that He bestows, but they are God Himself in action. God, then, is essentially unknowable, but existentially revealed through the energies or free acts of His omnipotence. This contrast between the essence and the energies of God was not invented by Gregory, but taken over by him from earlier Greek Fathers, in particular the Cappadocians; Gregory, however, imparted to the distinction a prominence and a precision which it did not before possess. Gregory’s aim in insisting upon this distinction was to allow a true ‘deification’ while excluding any taint of pantheism. ‘God,’ he wrote, ‘remains wholly within Himself and yet dwells in His entirety within us, granting us to share, not in His own nature, but in His own glory and brightness’ (Triads, I. 3. 23: Meyendorff, vol. I, p. 159). We participate in God, but we cannot appropriate Him; God possesses us, but we can never possess Him. If we knew God’s essence in the same way that He knows ours, then we should ourselves be God in the literal sense. But in fact this does not happen; however closely linked we are with God, He still remains God and we remain man. ‘Deification’ signifies that we become ‘gods’ by grace and by status, but never by nature: as St. John of Damascus expressed it, man ‘is deified by sharing in the divine illumination, but he is not changed into the divine essence’ (On the Orthodox Faith, II. 12: P.G. xciv. 924A). There is a true union, but no fusion or absorption. This distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies, as expounded by St. Gregory Palamas, has never been accepted in western theology. Latin writers have usually judged Palamism on the evidence of Gregory’s opponents, and so they have frequently failed to appreciate the real character of his teaching. They have also tended to interpret him according to the criteria of Thomism, without allowing sufficiently for the fact that Gregory’s terms of reference are very different from those assumed in western Scholasticism. The main western criticism of Palamism is that the distinction between essence and energies overthrows the simplicity of God, making Him into a kind of composite being. In Gregory’s view, however, the energies are most emphatically not a part or subdivision of God - still less, an emanation or inferior divinity - but the very God Himself in His entirety. ‘Each power or energy is God Himself,’ Gregory insisted (Letter to Gabras: in Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, p. 214); ‘God is wholly present in each of His divine energies’ (Triads, III, 2. 7, Meyen¬ dorff, vol. II, p. 657). There is, then, no division in the Godhead and no destruction of the divine simplicity, for the one God is fully and indivisibly present in each of the energies, just as He is fully present in each of the three persons, and fully present in His single essence. When the medieval west misunderstood Gregory’s teaching on the energies of God, this was partly because it started primarily from the idea of God as essence, whereas Gregory, in common with earlier Greek Fathers, started primarily from the idea of God as personal. (The same difference in approach, as we have seen, was involved in the filioque controversy.1) On the assumptions of western Scholasticism, therefore, a distinction between 1 See p. 211.

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essence and energies inevitably seemed to impair the simplicity of the Godhead. But on Gregory’s presuppositions, this danger is avoided. God remains single, simple, and unique, because He is not just an essence but personal: the multiplicity of energies and the indivisible essence are both alike ascribed to the selfsame Triune subject, to the single, living, and personal God. The divine energies are in no sense an intermediary between God and man; on the contrary, the Christian who participates in the energies of God is actually meeting God face to face, so far as this is possible for man. In relation to man, the energies are often designated by the term ‘grace’ (charis). ‘Grace’, in other words, is not just a gift of God, a ‘thing’ which He bestows on His creature. It is more than this: it is God Himself in confronta¬ tion with man - all the fullness of the divine presence and the divine life, as communicated to humanity. In this way Gregory excluded any magical and mechanistic understanding of salvation. God saves man directly by His own divine energies. Saving grace is not something created, to be stored quantitatively through sacramental acts and indulgences, to be dispensed and manipulated by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Saving grace is always sovereign, uncreated, and free. These uncreated energies, which from one point of view are termed ‘grace’, may with equal truth be described in terms of divine light. Barlaam was wrong, so Gregory argued, to conclude that the light beheld by the Hesychasts in prayer is nothing but a created and physical light. On the contrary, this light is the energies of God; and so it is not created but uncreated, not physical but non-material (aitlon) and ‘intelligible’ (noeron). Though it is not physical, the saints sometimes see it through their physical eyes; but in such a case their senses must first be transformed by divine grace, for they do not perceive the uncreated light by virtue of their normal powers of perception, but through the power of the Holy Spirit that dwells and acts within them. In order to be capable of the vision of God, the body and its faculties must first be transfigured and made spiritual. According to Gregory, this light which is manifested to the Hesychasts is identical with the light which shone from Christ at His transfiguration on Mount Tabor, and which will shine from Him likewise at His second coming on the Last Day. ‘Is it not evident,’ he asks, ‘that there is but one and the same divine light: that which the apostles saw on Tabor, which purified souls behold even now, and which is the reality of the eternal good things to come?’ (Triads, I. 3. 43: Meyendorff, vol. I, p. 205). The vision of the divine light is eschatological, and he who sees it is sharing already in the glory of the future age. There remains Barlaam’s second ground of attack, against the ‘physical method' employed by the Hesychasts. In itself this method was of secondary importance, and could have been abandoned by the Hesychasts without involving any major reorientation in their spirituality. But Palamas realized that behind Barlaam’s challenge there lay a question of basic significance for the Christian doctrine of man: and therefore he defended the bodily techniques, not primarily for themselves, but because of the deeper principle involved. As Palamas recognized, Barlaam held a fundamentally

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Platonist doctrine of man. The Calabrian saw man as a soul imprisoned in a body, and for this reason he affirmed a knowledge of God through the intellect alone, to the exclusion of man's material nature; that was why he found the physical techniques so scandalous. In opposition to Barlaam’s Platonizing doctrine, Gregory expounded an anthropology that was thoroughly scriptural. He insisted that man is a single whole, a unity of soul and body together; it is not just man's soul, so he believed, but the whole man that is created in the image of God. In Romans 7:24, as Gregory points out, it is not our material nature as such which St. Paul condemns, but ‘the body of this death’: the body in itself is not evil, but only our ‘bodily thoughts’ (Triads, I. 2. 1: Meyendorff, vol. I, p. 77). At His Incarnation Christ took not only a human soul but a human body, and so He has ‘made the flesh an inexhaustible source of sanctification’ {Homily 16: P.G. cli. 193B). In the eucharist we do not simply feed on Christ with our minds, but we actually eat His Body and drink His Blood: in this way our flesh is made holy by His flesh and it shares in His divine life. Gregory, then, affirms a doctrine of total sanctification: the whole of man, body as well as soul, is to be redeemed and transfigured. ‘The flesh also is transformed; it is raised on high together with the soul, and together with the soul it enjoys communion with God, becoming itself the possession and dwelling-place of God’ (Triads, I. 2. 9: Meyendorff, vol. I, p. 93). Man’s body is not an enemy, but a partner and collaborator with his soul. If this is true of the Christian life in general, it is also true of Christian prayer. When we pray, our body is not to be regarded as something indifferent or antagonistic - a lump of matter to be ignored, an obstacle to be overcome. On the contrary, the body too can share in the ascent to God’s presence. The physical technique of the Hesychasts is therefore based upon a genuinely Christian and Biblical understanding of human nature. True to this doctrine of man’s total sanctification, Gregory insists (as we have noted) that the vision of divine light, although in itself spiritual, can be seen through man’s bodily eyes. Not only do the saints gaze upon the light, but they are themselves filled with light - in their souls and in their bodies. To see the glory of God is also to share in it and to be transfigured by it. This bodily transfiguration will be accomplished in its fullness only at the resurrection of the body at the Last Day; but the first-fruits of that final glorification can be experienced even now. Here, as elsewhere, St. Gregory adheres to an inaugurated eschatology. ‘If in the age to come,’ he writes, ‘the body will share with the soul in unspeakable blessings, it must certainly share in them, as far as possible, even now’ (Tome of the Holy Mountain: P.G. cl. 1233C). So it may happen that even in this present life the bodies of the saints shine with divine glory, as Christ’s body shone on Mount Tabor. St. Symeon the New Theologian hints at this, in a passage already quoted:1 ‘He was wholly united with immaterial light and, so it seemed, he had himself become light.’ St. Gregory Palamas speaks in similar terms: ‘He who has received the divine energy ... is wholly as light’ (Homily 53: edited by S. Oikonomos, Athens, 1861, p. 177). Such were the primary themes in the thought of Palamas. God is un1 See p. 218.

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knowable in His essence, but revealed through His divine energies; and man can participate in these energies - which are God Himself - not only in the age to come, but here and now. The energies are experienced above all in the form of divine light. Since man is a single unity of body and soul, the body shares in the work of prayer and in the vision of God: the saints behold the uncreated light through their bodily eyes, and themselves shine bodily with the light that they behold. In this response of Palamas to Barlaam's double challenge, it is at once evident how close is the link subsisting between spirituality and dogma. Gregory was concerned to defend certain ways of prayer, a particular tradition of mystical experience; but he was fighting also for a proper understanding of human nature and of man’s total salvation in Christ. The theology of Palamas - in particular, his distinction between essence and energies and his doctrine concerning the divine light - was confirmed at a series of councils held in Constantinople during 1341, 1347, and 1351. Although Barlaam abandoned the struggle in 1341 and returned to the west, Gregory’s views still encountered fierce opposition at Byzantium, his leading adversaries after 1341 being Gregory Akindynos, and subsequently the scholar and historian Nicephorus Gregoras. Whereas Barlaam had stood primarily for a ‘humanist’ approach, Akindynos was a representative of the traditionalist ‘theology of repetition’. Akindynos, unlike Barlaam, did not attack the methods of prayer in use among the Hesychasts, but solely the distinction between essence and energies. Palamas was thus fighting on two fronts. Faced by the philosophical Nominalism and the doctrinal agnosticism of Barlaam, he championed the mystical realism of the Greek monastic world; faced by the narrow conservatism of Akindynos, he insisted upon the need for a living theology - for a creative understanding of tradition, rather than a mechanical traditionalism. Although the synods which confirmed the Palamite teaching were local and not general, they have come to enjoy an authority in the Orthodox East that is second only to that of the Seven Ecumenical Councils themselves. Among the friends and supporters of the Hesychasts, one of the most gifted and attractive is Nicolas Cabasilas (1322/3-c. 1380), a nephew of Nilus Cabasilas, Archbishop of Thessalonica.1 Nicolas, so far as is known, never became either priest or monk, but was a layman, serving at the court and in the civil service. Although the Byzantine mystical tradition flourished above all in monastic circles, it was never limited exclusively to hermits or members of religious communities; but its influence extended also to the laity, as the example of Nicolas indicates. Indeed, Symeon the New Theologian insisted explicitly that the full mystical experience is accessible to all alike - to married men and women, living in the midst of society, as well as to the anchorite and the recluse. In the same way, St. Gregory of Sinai - while living himself in strict withdrawal - instructed one of his spiritual children, Isidore, to postpone his monastic profession and to return for a time into the world, so that he could serve as guide and example to lay people who sought to practise inner prayer. And in a text attributed to St. Gregory Palamas it is stated: ‘Let no one think, my 1 See p. 213.

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brother Christians, that only priests and monks need to pray without ceasing, and not laymen. No, no: every Christian without exception ought to dwell always in prayer’ (Philokalia, vol. v, Athens, 1963, p. 107). The Hesychast vocation, then, is a path open potentially to everyone. Faithful to this understanding of Heyschasm, Nicolas Cabasilas strove to translate the mystical theology of Palamas into concrete and practical terms, more readily intelligible to ordinary Christians. He did this primarily by showing how the entire life of the Christian is centred upon the sacra¬ ments: in the words and ceremonial actions of the Liturgy and other offices, all the inner reality of mystical prayer is summed up and made outwardly manifest. In Nicolas Cabasilas the liturgical theology of Byzan¬ tium attained its finest flowering.1 Another notable exponent of Byzantine liturgical theology was Symeon of Thessalonica (71429). As a typical example of Cabasilas’ way of thinking, we may take his simple yet penetrating statement on the nature of the eucharistic sacrifice: ‘What are the teachings of our faith concerning sacrifice? In the first place, that this sacrifice is not a mere figure or symbol but a true sacrifice; secondly, that it is not the bread which is sacrificed, but the very Body of Christ; thirdly, that the Lamb of God was sacrificed once only, for all time . . . Now it is clear that, under these conditions, it is not necessary that there should be numerous oblations of the Lord’s Body. Since the sacrifice consists, not in the real and bloody immolation of the Lamb, but in the transformation of the bread into the sacrificed Lamb, it is obvious that the transformation takes place without the bloody immolation. Thus, though that which is changed is many, and the transformation takes place many times, yet nothing prevents the reality into which it is transformed from being one and the same thing always - a single Body, and the unique sacrifice of that Body’ (A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, translated by J. M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty, London, i960, pp. 81-2). The works of Cabasilas, above all his treatise On Life in Christ, show how closely mysticism and the sacramental life were linked together in the Hesychast milieu. Gregory of Sinai, Palamas and Cabasilas, like Symeon the New Theologian before them, did not in any way advocate a mystical ideal that was sub-Christian or individualist. Their teaching was firmly based upon the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, upon the corporate life of the Church, and the communal receiving of the sacraments. St. Gregory Palamas and the other leaders of the Hesychast movement constitute a striking proof that Byzantine religious thought retained its vitality until the very end of the Empire. The history of Christian doctrine in the east does not cease with the Council of Chalcedon in 451, nor yet with the last Ecumenical Council in 787. If the flame of theology burnt sometimes less brightly, at no point before 1453 was it ever entirely extinguished: and particularly during the fourteenth century, on the eve of the final collapse of Byzantine power, it shone once again as brilliantly as ever. It is a moving thing to observe how Byzantium made what is perhaps its greatest contribution to Christian civilization, not at a time of outward prosperity, but in the midst of material weakness and distress. 1 See further J. Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, London, 1975, chapter 16.



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The Middle Ages 604-1350 David Knowles

V

The Middle Ages 604-1350

David Knowles INTRODUCTORY The development of western theology in the long period of more than seven hundred years between the death of Pope Gregory I and the death of William of Ockham was for long a neglected historical topic. In part this was due to the comparative scarcity of great theologians and great theo¬ logical controversies between the centuries of patristic and conciliar brilliance, during which theological writings and discussions were the principal intellectual achievement of the Christian Empire, and the early modern period of ferment and controversy during which confessional differences rent western Europe and were a major interest alike of statesmen and of the newly literate and religiously active lower middle class in every country. In part, however, it is certainly due directly to the basic conviction of the Reformers, that for a thousand years Christian teaching had been deformed and obscured by ever greater accretions of error and superstition, and that it was necessary to rediscover the pure faith of the apostolic, or at least of the patristic age. This conviction, which was both an effect and a cause of the appearance and growth of critical scholarship, influenced the conservative or Catholic party also, and ‘scholastic’ theology gave way in many places to ‘positive’ historical and scriptural studies. It is undeniable that the Middle Ages gave birth to relatively few theologians worthy of being joined to the great company of those who flourished between the age of Origen and that of John Chrysostom in the east, and Tertullian and Leo the Great in the west. Between the seventh ecumenical council (787) and the council of Constance in 1414 there were no epoch-making conciliar debates. Nevertheless, even in our narrower period, which begins after the death of Gregory the Great and ends before the emergence of Wyclif, theological discussions and definitions took place that have deeply influenced all subsequent ages in the Roman church and have left their mark also, if only of reaction, upon the other churches of Christendom. They should not, indeed they cannot, be ignored by the historian, for they were the frame of great historical changes, and it is not for the historian to reject any opinion as a deviation from revealed truth, though he may assess modifications of traditional teaching and deviations from orthodoxy. The somewhat arbitrary choice of the death of Gregory I is defensible, for that great pope’s active life was passed at a moment of crisis in the west, and Gregory himself, like other great figures of the sixth century, looks both backward and forward. He is the last great figure in the proces-

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sion of Latin fathers, while in his government of the city of Rome and his missionary energy he is the harbinger of the half religious, half secular papal monarchy of the Middle Ages. In his writings, also, there is the double thread. On the one hand he uses and does not fear to adapt the teaching of Augustine and other great men of the past, while on the other hand he shows an unmistakable lack of theological profundity and of stylistic distinction when compared with a Leo or a Jerome, and his Dialogues show all the characteristics of a medieval, rather than of a classical, mentality. Similarly, the middle years of the fourteenth century mark a real watershed in the intellectual life of the church, when the marriage between philosophy and theology has broken up and the whole fabric of ecclesiastical thought and government is under critical attack. Within our long period we can make several divisions, which do not exactly correspond to those usually made in general or political history: I. There is, first, the period of about 150 years in which the church of Rome is still involved in the controversies and developments of the eastern church. II. Next comes the age of the Carolingian theological writers, and then the Photian age in the eastern church, followed by more than a century of stagnation and ending almost at the millennial year. III. This is followed in turn by the intellectual revival, which in the theological field saw the emergence, for the first time for more than four centuries, of individual minds of eminence, culminating in the careers of Anselm, Abelard and Bernard. IV. Overlapping this is the first great age of the organized schools, beginning with the cathedral schools of Chartres, Laon, Liege and elsewhere, and continuing in the masters of the Sentences and the nascent universities. V. Next, there is the great age of scholastic theology, particularly at Paris and Oxford, but also in many other universities and schools, in all of which the same methods and interests prevailed. VI. Finally, there is a period of change, in which the scholastic synthesis is dissolved by the New Logic.

I FROM GREGORY THE GREAT TO CHARLEMAGNE. ROME AND CONSTANTINOPLE i. The Monothelete controversy For more than 150 years after the death of Gregory the Great central and southern Italy from Venice southward along the Adriatic and from Bologna southwards through Rome, was nominally still part of the Empire, though only once after a.d. 600 did an emperor of Constantinople set foot in the duchy of Rome. While the north-eastern region formed a province or exarchate based on Ravenna, the central and southern part of the peninsula west of the Apennines fell gradually under the control of the papacy. In the duchy of Rome itself the pope, like other bishops in the western part of the empire, became the effective civil governor when the imperial government failed to protect or to assist, and the popes by gifts or inheritance became large landowners throughout central and southern Italy and Sicily. When the emperor and pope, as we shall see, were at odds, the people of Rome and the neighbourhood supported their familiar protector, and thus the pope, by an accident of history big wath consequences, acquired the status of a temporal monarch in the ‘patrimony of St. Peter’ which, when the emperor lost control of the exarchate of Ravenna, was joined by the coastal region from Ravenna to Ancona. During all this period the pope remained nominally a subject of the emperor and in imperial theory and practice he was bound to submit his election to Constantinople for ratification. On the other hand, the patriarch of Constantinople recognized a primacy in the Roman see, and each new patriarch informed the pope of his election and orthodoxy. It was therefore natural in this period that the Roman church should share in the controversies of the eastern church, which wrere in fact often referred to it for decision. The first of these was the dispute that was ultimately known as the Monothelete controversy. The great Christological disputes of the fifth century had issued in a clear assertion of the twofold nature and single personality of Christ, and in the statement that the Son of God had taken to himself a human nature which retained all its qualities and powrers. This agreement had not fully covered areas which in some cases were regions of dissidence or uneasy assent on either side, as it were, of the central orthodoxy. On the one hand the Nestorians, more definitely unorthodox than the alleged author of their belief, held fast to the two natures without a clear enunciation of the single personality. Christ, the whole Christ, had in some mysterious way been

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united to the divine nature without a clear definition of personal union. Nestorianism retained its hold on parts of Syria. On the other hand, Monophysitism in its most characteristic form maintained that Christ’s human nature had been entirely absorbed in the divine. This was in origin an Alexandrian opinion, and the church in Egypt remained Monophysite in sympathy, and its teaching spread also to Syria and Armenia. When, early in the seventh century, the emperor Heraclius (610-641) was engaged in repelling the Persian invaders, his enemies received con¬ siderable support from the Monophysites, who hoped to remain in greater security under Persian government. Heraclius therefore attempted to restore unity to the east and attract dissident Christians to his rule, by finding a formula that would satisfy both orthodox and monophysite opinion. His close ally Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople, seconded his efforts. There had been previous discussions as to whether, in the face of the decree of the council of Chalcedon, it was still possible to say, in view of the hypostatic or 'personal' union of the two natures, that in Christ there was only one principle of operation (evcpyela). Sergius and Heraclius adopted this opinion, and held it out as a basis of agreement with the Monophysites. Cyrus, patriarch of Alexandria, and Anastasius, patriarch of Antioch, accepted this, and a general agreement seemed to be within sight. It was challenged by two Egyptian monks, Sophronius, who became almost immediately patriarch of Jerusalem, and Maximus (580-662), celebrated later as the Confessor. Sophronius circulated his teaching to Rome and the other patriarchs: it was that two natures demanded two separate ‘opera¬ tions’, both directed by a single personality. Meanwhile Sergius had written to Pope Honorius (625-38) and others, deprecating the assertion of either one or two ‘energies’ in Christ, as adding a new precision to Chalcedon which would alienate one or other of the two bodies of opinion. He therefore asked for the pope’s approval to the proposition that Christ, the Word made Man, had only a single principle of activity, and that there was no conflict of will in Christ. Honorius, who was not an expert theologian and who saw the practical need for unity, agreed that there was no conflict of will in Christ, and that it was the business of philosophers, not of religious teachers, to decide whether there were one or two ‘operations’. By this time the formal opposition of Sophronius, setting out the doctrine of two wills in Christ, had reached Sergius, who in consequence changed his terminology. He consequently prepared a dogmatic statement for the emperor Heraclius to publish - the celebrated Ecthesis of 638. In this the emperor and his patri¬ arch deprecated the assertion of either a single or a double operation in Christ, but to silence the opinion of Sophronius the document ended by asserting that there was in Christ only a single will. Hitherto the popular, and perhaps also the theological, mind had been confused by the manipulation of scriptural and conciliar texts alongside of technical philosophical terms such as nature and person. Sophronius, and still more Maximus, helped to clarify the matter by showing that personality added nothing to a nature beyond giving it existence and the power to act; all the faculties are within a nature, and although the person is said to act

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and suffer, this is because the existing person is regarded as a compound of nature and personality. In the case of Christ, where two natures are united in one personality, the human nature is absolutely complete in itself with will, reason, etc., but it is actualized by a divine person. In other words, the Word does not either absorb the human nature or use it merely as an instrument. Christ’s human nature has all the faculties and powers, includ¬ ing the will, which is not of itself subordinated to the divine will, but is freely directed to compliance with it. There are therefore two wills in Christ, in whom the human will is indissolubly (though freely) united with the divine will in virtue of the grace of the hypostatic union. Pope Honorius died in 638. Two years later Pope John IV, at a council held in Rome, condemned the doctrine of a single will in Christ, now known as the monothelete heresy. The emperor Heraclius died a few weeks later, and the pope wrote to his sons who succeeded him a letter which, after endeavouring to justify the action of Honorius, set out what was ultimately to be held as the orthodox doctrine. Shortly afterwards the Arab conquest of Armenia and Egypt weakened and isolated the monothelete party both within and without the new boundaries of Christendom. Disagreement nevertheless continued to appear between successive popes on the one hand, and emperors and patriarchs of Constantinople, on the other. The patriarch Paul was excommunicated by Pope Theodore in 647, while the patriarch persuaded the emperor Constans II to abolish the Ecthesis and to publish the Typos (‘Rule’) in which he reiterated the earlier prohibition of all discussion as to the wills and energies of Christ. This came too late to be effective, and in 649 Pope Martin I held a synod at the Lateran attended by 500 bishops. Here, after a discussion, the two wills of Christ were proclaimed in a reiteration of the creed of Chalcedon, to which an addition was made for this express purpose, together with an anathema of the Ecthesis, Typos and erring patriarchs of Constantinople. This was accepted without demur in the west, where the issue had never been controversial, but the emperor Constans II caused the pope to be seized and brought for trial to Constantinople, allegedly for anti-imperial treason. He was brutally treated and exiled to the Crimea, where he died. Maximus the Confessor, seized in Rome along with the pope, was tortured and exiled. A period of confusion followed, in which the imminent danger of attack from the Arabs, and a widespread revulsion at the treatment of Martin and Maximus, prevented further disunion. Finally, when the siege of Constanti¬ nople (674-8) had ended, Pope Agatho held a council in Rome in 680 which reiterated the decisions of 649, and delegates carried a dogmatic letter to Constantinople where the emperor Constantine IV had convoked a council, recognized as the Sixth Ecumenical. In this, after long discussion, the decisions of previous Roman councils were reaffirmed, and the doctrine of two wills in Christ was proclaimed, with anathemas for the erring patriarchs, to whom was added the name of Honorius. Pope Leo II accepted both the decisions and the anathemas. This was the end of the heresy as a controversy dividing the churches, though it continued to smoulder for some years and was part of the back¬ ground of the great controversy over images. It was also the end of the

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long theological dialogue in which the doctrine of Christian Christology was hammered out, to assert at once the divine personality and the complete human nature of Jesus Christ. The monothelete issue had its importance as the last attempt to impose upon Christendom what may be called a series of pseudo-supernatural conceptions of the divine Redeemer. All of these might superficially have simplified the intellectual problems of the believer, or at least the believer in an age which readily admitted the possibility of demiurges and theophanies and degrees of divinity. But it would not only have debased or destroyed the simple, original, evangelical belief that the son of Mary was also the Son of God, but would have presented future ages, more rationalistic and naturalistic in their outlook, with insuperable difficulties of scriptural and theological definition. The doctrine of the Incarnation necessarily remained, and still remains, a mystery, for it expresses the greatest and most sublime creative work of a transcendent, infinite, incomprehensible deity, but once granted belief in an omnipotent divine Being, the Incarnation can be expressed in terms that do not violate the dignity and truth either of God or of man, and that display, even to the unbeliever, an alliance between God and human nature which, if its reality is granted, appears as a marvel of wisdom and love. General histories sometimes convey the impression that all theological and administrative ability disappeared from the Roman church with the death of Gregory I. This was not so, and the stages of the monothelete controversy show that bishops of Rome still disposed of theological re¬ sources and were able to rally, for discussion and decision, considerable members from the episcopate of Italy, the Mediterranean islands and the coasts of the Adriatic. Historians of liturgy, music and architecture show that the seventh and early eighth centuries were something of a golden age, in which Greek influences, side by side with Roman traditions, enriched the life of the church. It was in this age that Greek Marial devotion introduced several new festivals into the Roman calendar, including the Assumption, which originally celebrated the passing of the soul of the Virgin into God’s presence, without express assertion of a corporeal assumption. This close connection with Greek thought and liturgy was to be seen in the history of the Iconoclast controversy, in which the pope of Rome still showed his ecumenical influence, though the political consequences of the struggle were to have a critical effect upon the relations of East and West. 2. The Iconoclast controversy This disastrous affair, which is often treated as a self-contained episode in Byzantine history, was in fact a mixture of doctrinal, sociological, political and personal issues. The doctrinal issue was long-standing, im¬ portant and twofold. As is well known, the making and still more the cult of images and pictures of the divinity or of any sacred object or person was strictly forbidden to the people of Israel. The prohibition was not carried over into the New Testament, and from very early times painted and (later) sculptural and other representations of the cross, of Christ, and of incidents in the gospel made their appearance, and despite the opposition of a few rigid ‘puritanical’ writers, such as Eusebius of Caesarea, and certain

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churches, the custom spread and was accepted in both east and west. Later the cult made its appearance; that is, marks of honour, private and liturgical, were paid to the cross and to pictures and statues of Christ, his Mother and the saints. This again met with opposition but received the theological justification that became traditional. In the western church at this time extravagance and superstition were rare, but in the east, and particularly in Constantinople and its hinterland, and in the monasteries of the Empire, the reverence and cult shown to ikons (images) were often excessive and superstitious. This would not, however, have occasioned violent political upheaval, which was originally entirely due to the action of the emperor Leo III the Isaurian, whose leadership and military genius had recently rescued the empire and the City from the attacks of the Arabs. In 726 he prohibited the cult of images and decreed their total destruction. The causes of this drastic action are still uncertain. The emperor was a Syrian by birth, and the inborn eastern repugnance to representational art in religion, the influence of Old Testament and Muslim prohibitions, the monophysite dislike of any honour paid to the humanity of Christ and the divine motherhood of Mary, may all have had a share in Leo’s action. In any case, a violent persecution ensued which disrupted the life of the empire for more than a century, though with intervals of peace. Popes Gregory II (715-31) and Gregory III (731-41) protested strongly, and the latter held a council of 93 bishops in 731 at which the accepted traditional doctrine was reiterated with anathemas. This provoked direct action by the emperor, who con¬ fiscated the papal estates in Sicily and south Italy and attached to Con¬ stantinople the Balkan peninsula and Greece, hitherto considered as lying within the western patriarchate. Finally, in 754 a council of eastern bishops held near Chalcedon condemned the manufacture, possession and veneration of images. This, however, did not reflect the great mass of sentiment in the Byzantine church, and thirty years later the empress Irene, a supporter of images (an ‘iconodule’ as opposed to an ‘iconoclast’), in consultation with Pope Adrian I arranged a council at Nicaea, the Seventh Ecumenical (787), which pronounced the lawfulness and value of images and distinguished between the honour and cult (dulia) due to them and the adoration (latria) due to God alone. This settlement was reversed for a while (813-43) but finally re-established solemnly and permanently. Meanwhile the controversy had brought about unpredictable conse¬ quences in the west. We are not concerned with political or papal history as such, but it may be well to recall that the papacy, which had by the force of events succeeded to the dominion of central Italy when the emperors lost their grip on the west, had later been driven by attacks from the invading Lombards to solicit the aid of the rulers of Frankland (roughly modern France, Belgium and the Rhineland), Pippin and his son Charles. As a result this son, Charlemagne, whose sphere of rule had extended into north Italy, came to exercise a certain control over the papacy and to regard himself as a divinely appointed ruler of the people of God, responsible for their beliefs and morals, leaving the pope as ultimate authority. Meanwhile Charlemagne had gathered round him at his court at Aachen a number of able and active theological writers, among whom were the Spaniard

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Theodulf, bishop of Orleans and the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin of York (730-804). Compared with their activity the papal curia, which had suffered at the hands of both Byzantines and Lombards, was comparatively inactive. This permitted a series of controversies in which the imperial theologians, supported by Charlemagne, acted without reference and sometimes in opposition to papal policy. Iconoclasm was one such matter. The Frankish and Germanic west was hostile both in politics and religion to the Byzantine church, and had no sympathy with the excessive part played by ikons in its liturgy and devotional life. Charlemagne himself was smarting under a serious rebuff from the empress Irene. At this moment he received (788) from the pope a very faulty Latin translation of the acts of the council of Nicaea, which seemed to authorize adoration (in the theological sense) of images. The king called on his theologians for a refutation, and Theodulf and Alcuin produced the long and celebrated Caroline Books (Libri Carolini), in which even relative worship - that is, worship given externally to the image and internally to the person or mystery represented - was declared unla wful. Such worship, it was argued, would in any case be beyond the intelligence of most Christians. Candles and incense burnt before images were prohibited, though the artistic representation of persons and events was permitted. Pope Hadrian, surprised at this, wrote to Charles explaining the faults of translation and reiterating the traditional doctrine of the council, but this would seem to have had little immediate effect upon the king and his advisers, and the church of Frankland stood by the position of Alcuin until the Fourth Council of Constantinople (869) reiterated the decisions of Nicaea taken a century earlier. 3. The Spanish Adoptionists This was not the first excursion of Alcuin and his allies into theological controversy. He had previously undertaken to controvert what was given the name of Spanish ‘Adoptionism’. On an earlier page of the present book mention has been made of the Christological heresy named Adoptionism, which taught that Jesus was adopted as his son by God the Father at his baptism. This had been recognized at once as unorthodox, but several of the Latin fathers had been at pains to distinguish between the divine and the human natures in Christ, and to emphasize that while the Son had been God from eternity, the divine Person had taken to himself or ‘assumed’ in time a complete human nature (homo assumptus) at the first moment of its coming into being in the Virgin’s womb. They went on to state that by this action of the Son human nature, as realized in all other human beings, had through union with Christ been received into adopted sonship by God. As in the monothelete controversy, orthodoxy could be preserved only by those who could distinguish both in word and thought between human nature as a concept, and an individual human nature personified. This may help to explain the occurrence in the Spanish Mozarabic liturgy of several ancient formulas, among them allusions to the assumption by the Person .of the Word of a human nature, which was described as 'adoption'. This may explain the convocation of a council by Elipandus, archbishop of Toledo in Spain, when he was called upon to act against one

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Migetius. Migetius was alleged to have taught that Jesus was one of the three Persons of the Trinity - a permissible expression if carefully explained, but not a desirable one for general use. The council, criticizing Migetius, asserted that the Son of Man was the adopted son of God as distinguished from him who was the Son of God by nature. He was ‘at once son of man and Son of God, adopted son in his humanity, not adopted in his divinity’. This statement also, like that of Migetius, would seem to be patient of an orthodox explanation, but it was seized upon by the abbot Beatus, the well-known commentator on the Apocalypse, who delated Elipandus to Pope Hadrian I as an heretic. Hadrian replied with a careful theological explanation, condemning the expression ‘adopted son’ as used of Christ, whereupon Elipandus referred the matter for judgement to his suffragan Felix of Urgel, a town recently recaptured from Islam by the Franks. Felix approved of the expression, whereupon he was delated to Charlemagne and summoned first to Regens¬ burg and then to Rome, duly recanting his opinions to king and pope. Meanwhile the Spanish bishops, in full agreement with Elipandus, had replied to Beatus, standing firmly by the expression ‘adopted son’, which they probably understood as ‘adopted human nature', and applied to Charlemagne for support. Charlemagne in turn applied to Pope Hadrian, who sent a second and firmer letter to Spain, reiterating his condemnation under anathema. At the same time Charlemagne, at the great council of all the bishops of his realm at Frankfurt (794), in which the question of images had been discussed, secured a condemnation of the phrase ‘adopted son’ and provided, through Alcuin, a long and powerful refutation. This did not end the matter, for Elipandus and Alcuin continued the controversy which disappeared, unresolved, into the darkness which covers Spanish history from the end of the 'eighth to the middle of the eleventh century. The Adoptionist issue, like some other and earlier Christological disputes, was probably caused by confused thinking on the part of all parties in Spain, only to be fanned by a lack of sympathetic understanding on the part of Alcuin. 4. The Filioque controversy Meanwhile another dispute was looming up which was to have more fatal consequences. This was the first appearance of the difference of opinion in east and west on the Procession of the Holy Ghost. The so-called Nicene creed in its original and traditional form asserted the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father, and no more, but during the sixth century the words ‘and from the Son’ (Filioque) had been added in Spain, perhaps as a precaution against any remaining traces of Arianism, and in 589 the council of Toledo had embodied it in its profession of faith, whence it had passed to the churches of Gaul. Theologically speaking, it was to Fatin minds no more than a corollary of the Nicene definition of the consubstantiality of the Father and Son. Nevertheless, it was unquestion¬ ably an addition, unauthorized, by Council or Pope, to the sacrosanct formula which had been canonized repeatedly and publicly, and an addition which in fact enshrined a way of expressing the mystery that was un-

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mistakably western; the eastern church preferred to say that the Spirit proceeded from the Father by way of the Son. In the event, the phrase was included in the creed as recited and sung in the liturgy throughout Gaul, and specifically in the royal chapel at Aachen. In the strained political situation which had given both birth and bitterness to the Caroline books, the Filioque issue was placed on the carpet gratui¬ tously enough, at the command of Charlemagne, at the council of Friuli (796) by Alcuin and his associates, and the Greek position was condemned. Not content with this, Theodulf of Orleans, a Spaniard by birth, returned to the charge, and the double procession was affirmed as of faith at a council at Aachen (809). A petition was sent to Pope Leo III demanding that he should approve this decision and insert the phrase in the creed, to be chanted at Mass. The pope approved the doctrine, but expressed displeasure at the insertion of the phrase in the creed, and refused to adopt this usage himself. So the matter rested for some sixty years. 5. The development of the discipline of Penance While in the west both the liturgical development and the theological issues were the result of contacts with the eastern church, a development of great importance for the personal religious life of Christendom was taking place at the western periphery of Europe. The history of what came to be recognized as the sacrament of penance is one of the strangest, as also one of the darkest, chapters in the development of doctrine and devotional practice. When the clarity of the words of Christ when bestowing power on his apostles to forgive sins (John 20:23) is recalled, it must seem strange to the historian that the exercise of this power, apart from such rites as baptism and anointing, which derived their efficacy from other dominical institutions, was so long in achieving definition. While the practice of punitive excommunication and remission of sentence is apostolic, that of penitential segregation following upon the confession of serious fault, and itself followed by formal reconciliation, is slow to appear, and when it appears, is for long and of set purpose extremely limited in its application. The celebrated controversies of the days of Origen and Tertullian as to the irremediable character of certain sins and the unrepeatable nature of public penance, strike the modem mind as out of harmony with the spirit of Christ, while on the other hand the restriction of attention to a few sins, such as homicide, adultery and apostasy, would seem to show an unreality of moral outlook which is out of harmony with the teaching of Christ and St. Paul. Yet all the scanty evidence goes to show that for the first four centuries of the church’s existence the only official exercise of the power of the keys was the yearly assignment of penance and the subsequent public reconciliation by the bishop at the end of Lent. The rare adumbrations of later discipline such as the permission of private confession preceding public penance, and the delegation of the penancing and absolution by the bishop to priests, had no wide influence. When Christians, from being a people apart, living under disabilities and persecutions, and therefore remaining few and fervent, became a vast multitude of varying degrees of piety and mediocrity, the old discipline was clearly inapplicable, but for several

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centuries no revolutionary change was made and the public Lenten penance and absolution seem to have continued, as did the similar discipline of the catechumenate, as a public liturgical ceremony which became more and more vestigial. Meanwhile the fervent were finding satisfaction in the new movement of monasticism. In this the relationship of elder and spiritual father to disciple and novice gave birth to spiritual direction and to the confession of daily faults to the abbot or master. This was often accompanied by the imposition of a penance and a prayer for the penitent’s forgiveness on the part of the abbot, and thus the elements of the modern practice of confession were assembling. As monasticism spread westwards from Egypt, matter for a knowledge of the principles of what are now called moral and mystical theology was accumulating. This teaching was given form and currency by the writings of Cassian and the Rule of St. Benedict, but the confession of ‘venial’ faults and shortcomings was made to the abbot or spiritual father as such, with no thought of ‘sacramental’ absolution. A similar development took place in the Greek church, with monks as its leaders, and it was among them that regular private confession was in time introduced. In the west, the great change took place in the Celtic monasteries of the sixth century. The tribal monasteries outside the jurisdiction of a diocesan bishop ruled out the possibility of the ancient penitential discipline, and the frequent presence of a bishop and several priests in the monasteries seems to have given rise quite naturally to frequent auricular confession, and very soon a type of document appeared, known as the penitential, in which all common varieties of sin were enumerated, together with the appropriate penance. Very soon the practice spread to all, monks, clerics, and layfolk, and was carried by the Celtic emigrants and missionaries wherever they went, from Iona to Luxeuil. It passed into Northumbria by way of the missionaries from Iona and elsewhere, and was widely adopted by the Anglo-Saxon church after the Whitby meeting. Archbishop Theodore, who as a Greek monk would have been familiar with the eastern practice, formally accepted confession for layfolk, and his decisions were embodied by a disciple in the so-called Penitential that bears his name. Bede (674-733) and archbishop Egbert approved the custom and it was carried by Willibrord and Boniface to Frisia and Germany. For some time there was no evolution of discipline in Rome and south Gaul, though the public penance of Lent was rare apart from a few cities, and penance for heinous crime was presumably a private matter between penitent and bishop, a reconciliation in public (in foro exlerno) rather than an absolution in private (in foro intevno). Among the bishops and liturgists at the court of Charlemagne and his son, Louis the Pious, there was an antiquarian attempt to revive public penance, at least for grave sins, but this was clearly impracticable in the large dioceses and scattered communities of rural areas, and gradually the new practice became universal. In monasteries a weekly or daily confession became common; Chrodegang of Metz inserted it in his rule for clerics, while in the tenth century confession before communion at the four great feasts of the year became common for layfolk. In time, the practice spread down to

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southern Gaul and Italy. The decree on making confession (Omnis utriusque sexus) of Chapter 21 of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) did no more than canonize common usage. Auricular and frequent confession gave an impetus to moral teaching and spiritual direction all over Europe, and hearing confessions and solving problems of conscience became one of the most important of a priest’s pastoral tasks. Thus the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon churches gave to western Europe and in course of time to the world-wide Catholic church one of the most important elements of its sacramental and ascetical life. Yet the fact that private, frequent confession had come in, so to say, by the back door, left the practice without full theological expression, and, as we shall see, discussions on the worth and conditions of sacramental absolution continued for more than two centuries. 6. Indulgences Closely allied in origin, though totally different in its theology, is the history of indulgences. It was the traditional teaching, supported by universal Christian sentiment, that even after a serious fault had been committed the penance imposed or performed might not have fully ‘satisfied’ for the sin, or, in modern phraseology, might not have fully reintegrated the personality in the fullness of faith and love. This was less obvious in public penance and in the early penitentials, where the penalties imposed were often both lengthy and severe, but the universal tendency in later centuries to soften discipline gave rise to uneasiness, while the common practice of commuting or dispensing from severe penances (e.g. the sub¬ stituting of almsgiving for severe fasting) was itself a tacit assertion of the power of the church to give an ‘indulgence’. In the tenth century the bishops of southern France and northern Spain are found assigning a remissive value to pilgrimages, especially that to the shrine of St. James at Compostela, quite apart from their knowledge of the sins of individuals, and the passage from the commutation of a penance to its remission was accomplished when the reward of remission was attached to the fulfilment of fixed conditions, and when it was announced that the accomplishment of a particular act or prayer was the equivalent, in remissive terms, of so many days or years of penance. Hence the phrases such as ‘forty days of true indulgence’, which were often mistaken to signify a shortening of the term of punishment after death. A landmark in the extension of the practice came when an indulgence was held out as an enticement to fight for the faith on crusade in Spain or in the East, and it received unparalleled advertisement by the offer of a ‘plenary’ (i.e. total) remission of temporal penalties to crusaders by Urban II in 1095. From that time the public proclamation of papal indulgences became common, and it was natural that popes should take steps to prevent inflation of the currency, if the metaphor be allowed, by forbidding bishops to give more than a relatively small remission of forty days, and indulgences for long remained occasional. It was this that gave significance to the plenary indulgence which St. Francis of Assisi secured for his Porziuncola chapel, or that which later popes attached to the devotions of pilgrims throughout the Roman jubilee year.

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The theological basis of an indulgence is to be found in the power of Christ’s representatives on earth to direct the intercessory merit of the Church, regarded as the mystical and holy Body of Christ, to the needs of particular persons, or, in other words, to apply to individuals the treasures of love and self-sacrifice amassed by Christ, his mother and all the saints. It does not remit the guilt of sin, indeed it presupposes a soul restored to active membership of the church by repentance and absolution; it is concerned solely with the deficit of sufficient practical and remedial satis¬ faction for past sins already remitted; but popes, bishops and preachers cannot be acquitted of having often used ambiguous or incorrect terms, and layfolk and even clerics were often persuaded that a plenary indulgence remitted both guilt and punishment for sins, and that the length of time specified represented a remission of time spent by the soul in Purgatory. Indeed, the uninstructed faithful from the eleventh century onwards were often confused in mind and regarded indulgences in a legalistic and mechanistic way as providing passports to heaven, an illusion which encouraged and was stimulated by all kinds of unworthy and sacrilegious traffic.

FROM CHARLEMAGNE TO THE ELEVENTH CENTURY i. The first Eucharistic debate The theological writings during Charlemagne’s lifetime were the work of official spokesmen of the king or emperor, and in particular Alcuin and Theodulf, attacking supposed errors which threatened to contaminate Frankland, such as Adoptionism, or which were part of the stock-in-trade of controversialists and diplomats in the eastern and western courts. In the following generation, when capacity for theological writing was diffused more widely, the debates took place between individuals or groups of the clergy of Francia or Germany, and usually ended without a final or official doctrinal pronouncement. The first of these concerned the manner of Christ’s presence in the consecrated elements of the Eucharist, and is of interest as bringing up some of the problems, and of the solutions to those problems, that were to occupy the minds of theologians for many centuries at a later date. It was opened almost unwittingly by Paschasius Radbert (d. 860), later abbot of Corbie in Picardy, who composed c. 831-3 a long treatise on the Eucharist for the monks of Corvey, the German daughter-house of the French abbey. This treatise, a few years later, was touched up and presented to the emperor Charles the Bald. Throughout this work he insisted on the reality of the presence of Christ behind the veil of appearances. It is the body of Christ, born of the Virgin and sacrificed on the cross, that is now offered again as victim. So far Radbert was no more than expressing clearly, not to say starkly, the doctrine that had developed in the west, deriving particularly from the writings of St. John Chrysostom and St. Ambrose, but he went on to describe the body of Christ as if spatially existent in miniature in the host, and as present by a miraculous transformation or creation. This presentation of the matter came as a shock to those who had been nurtured on St. Augustine and who regarded the Eucharist as a mystery and as an effective symbol both of the presence of Christ and of the unity of the faithful. Rabanus Maurus (784-856), ‘the schoolmaster of Germany’, replied that in his view the presence of Christ was primarily something realized by the recipient when united with the Lord in the sacrament. The strife became general. Gottschalk, whom we shall meet later, raged from his prison against Radbert, while objecting also to the symbolic expressions of Rabanus; for him, the presence of the Lord was objective, even if mysterious in its manner. Ratramnus (d. 868), like Radbert a monk of Corbie, com¬ missioned by the Emperor to give his views, attacked Radbert, holding the

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presence of Christ to be spiritual, indeed, but real, as was also the reception of the Body and Blood of Christ. Radbert replied more than once, insisting on the real presence (‘this is my body') while disclaiming any intention of supposing a corporeal presence. The body and blood of Christ are there, but we cannot define the manner of their presence. With this, the controversy faded away, to be revived more than two centuries later, when the presentation of Radbert in the main prevailed. Ratramnus, for his part, as a would-be faithful Augustinian, may have helped to influence Aelfric in England in the late tenth century, and was excavated as a medieval forerunner by some theologians of the Reformation. 2. Predestination The second controversy, which was more prolonged and into which all the leading theologians of the age were drawn, concerned predestination and was initiated by Gottschalk. This unfortunate man (d. 868-9), originally a monastic oblate at Fulda and the protege of its abbot, Rabanus Maurus, obtained release from the monastic life and became a priest, only to spend the rest of his life in a succession of controversies and imprisonments. Saturating himself with the teaching of St. Augustine, he began to hold and to broadcast in northern Italy an extreme version of that doctor's teaching on predestination. All are predestined, either to glory or to damnation. Alerted by the bishop of Verona, Rabanus Maurus moved to the attack of his erstwhile pupil. Failing perhaps to see the real problem, he attributed all eternal consequences for men to God’s foreknowledge: seeing the good actions of the just and the misuse of grace by the evil he allots the fitting reward to each. Rabanus ignored altogether the kernel of Augustine’s problem, which was the accepted existence of a human race immersed in sin, original and personal. Gottschalk in reply asserted this with ruthless clarity. Man in original sin could do no good without grace, God’s free gift. Not all men are saved; hence God did not will the salvation of all; Christ died only for the predestined. Rabanus passed this treatise on to archbishop Hincmar of Rheims (d. 882), and Gottschalk was scourged and imprisoned (848); undeterred, he continued to publish his opinions which were in fact almost identical with Augustine’s harshest utterances. Hincmar replied, mainly in the manner of Rabanus, and stressing that Christ died for all men, but Ratramnus, a friend of Gottschalk and a strong Augustinian, opposed him, as did also Lupus of Ferrieres, holding fast to the Augustinian presentation of the human race as a massa damnata. Hincmar, facing defeat, appealed to the Irish Dionysian theologian, John Erigena (c. 810-c. 877), who replied in a basically Augustinian sense, but as a Neoplatonist refused to admit the existence of evil or the possibility of the divine simplicity issuing alternative decrees of predestination. This produced widespread dissatisfaction, and a kind of theological ‘free-for-all’ ensued, in which Hincmar took most of the punishment. Councils regional and royal suc¬ ceeded one another, and that of Quierzy (853) marked something of an epoch with its four celebrated decrees of an anti-Augustinian tenor, viz.: (1) There is only one predestination, that of the elect, and this does not depend upon God’s foresight of their merits. In the case of the lost,

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the divine foresight sees that some will remain in original sin, and that others, who are now in grace, will fall from grace. (2) Man’s liberty, lost by original sin, is restored by grace. (3) God wishes the salvation of all. (4) Christ suffered for all. Thus when controversy had raged for some fifteen years the question of predestination remained finally unsettled. Bishops and theologians had disagreed, as they had disagreed in the fifth and were again to disagree in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in their interpretation and accep¬ tance of Augustine, and in the different emphasis they attached to the sovereignty of God, to human liberty and to the breadth of the redemptive will of Christ. 3. The breach between East and West The most important happening in the medieval centuries from the ecumenical standpoint was undoubtedly the separation of the eastern and western churches. It was a long process, and the year 1054, often regarded as the decisive date, is no more than a useful indication of the moment in autumn when a wintry day reminds us that the year is dying. The deepest causes of that division were not primarily or strictly theological. Rather, they were sociological and political, differences of life, race and outlook, aggravated by repeated intemperance, obstinacy and pride of office in the leaders on both sides, and irreconcilable in practice owing to the physical and linguistic chasm between the Christian peoples, who were entirely ignorant of the catastrophe that threatened. It was only in the later stages of the quarrel that liturgical and theological differences were inflated so as to become seemingly insurmountable barriers. The eastern church, despite charges of heterodoxy bandied backwards and forwards at times of tension, was never regarded as formally and irre¬ vocably heretical by the Roman church. The shoe, indeed, was on the other foot. The sole purely theological issue, the procession of the Holy Spirit from Father and Son (Filioque) was, as we have seen, due to an arbitrary, if bona fide, addition to the Nicene creed by the Spanish church, adopted by Charlemagne largely for reasons of state, deprecated for long by the papacy, and only officially embodied in the western creed when the eastern church hardened its opposition into a charge of heresy. The west never officially condemned the east as heretical on this point, and indeed the eastern church did no more than abide by a hallowed formula; to this day the Orthodox church, from the Roman point of view, is in schism, not in heresy. The east, on the other hand, accused the west of heresy with growing insistence, and when in later centuries, for whatever reasons, a temporary union was achieved, the Greeks did no more than allow that the western formula, if understood rightly, was not heretical. Moreover, although the jeers of historians from Gibbon downwards at the futility of the controversy show ignorance of genuine theological difficulties, there have not been wanting eminent theologians on either side who have allowed that several of the ancient Greek fathers used language patient of the western interpreta¬ tion, and that, when all is said and done, the difference between the two

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beliefs, at least until the days of Photius, was one of expression rather than of substance. As for the other chief points of controversy many, such as the celibacy of the priesthood, the use of unleavened bread, the date of Easter, and the like, are patently inessential to the faith. The real divergence on the matter of divorce is in part a survival from the long ages when even the western church as a whole had not yet made a precise definition in the matter, and in part due to the contamination of old eastern practice by ancient Roman law. The western Mariology and teaching on purgatory, which the modern eastern church repudiates, are in fact descended (whether legitimately or not does not affect the historical fact) from seeds of tradition or cult which are found in the later patristic age in both eastern and western authors. There remains the one great dispute, important for its far-reaching practical implications as well as for its theological content, on papal supremacy and doctrinal authority. Basically, here also a series of largescale political and demographical changes, added to a gradual move on both sides away from the common outlook of the pre-Constantinian or preJustinian churches, have resulted, again on both sides, in a theory of church government and doctrinal control bearing little apparent resemblance to that held throughout Christendom in sub-apostolic days. Even later, in the fourth century, the ecumenical church was taken by all to consist of four or five cultural and political areas governed by a ‘patriarch’ who exercised little more than a supervisory role over the bishops within his area. Of these patriarchs one, the Roman patriarch of the west, had in the eyes of all an acknowledged if ill-defined primacy. The ultimate source of unity was the general council at which the bishop of Rome was accepted as having rights of precedence and initiative. This unwritten constitution was rendered void by three great political changes - the conquest of all the eastern patri¬ archates save Constantinople by the Muslims; the close political and ecclesiastical union between the eastern emperor and the patriarch of Constantinople; and the rise to a monarchical position of the papacy in a newly converted continent, when the papacy itself had been hardened by its struggle for independence from lay control and from the eastern and western empires. As the centuries passed, the eastern church, hand-in-glove with the imperial government, became a missionary, apostolic force in Russia and the Balkans, while the western church under the stress of its own contest with the Empire and moral relaxation, became a tightly disciplined, legalistic body, in which the clergy were the masters under a monarchic pontiff who claimed rights in the political sphere as well as in the spiritual realm. As a result a seemingly unbridgeable gulf opened between an organized and centralized church, looking to Rome for its doctrinal and functional well-being, and a church which for long was closely associated with the imperial government and later, owing to political catastrophe, lost external coherence as well as the essential elements (patriarchs and general councils) of its original ecclesiology.

Ill THE AGE OF REVIVAL AND REFORM, IOOO-I150 In the history of the church, this age is chiefly remarkable for the successful reassertion of papal supremacy within the western church which now, as a closely-knit hierarchy under papal control, became a separate ‘estate’ from the laity and developed its claim to guide, and under certain circumstances to dictate to and to depose secular rulers. Of this nothing will be said in these pages, partly because the theology, as distinct from the political and canonical developments, of the papal claims received little or no theological elaboration in the period and partly because the subject is one of extreme complexity in which political thought and legal theory occupy more space than theology. 1. The second Eucharistic controversy The first theological controversy of the new age was eucharistic, and is inseparably linked with the name of Berengarius (d. 1088), the archdeacon of Angers and former pupil of Fulbert of Chartres. He was by predilection a dialectician and a strong advocate of the use of logical and rational argument in theology, and his unorthodox opinions on the Eucharist were probably inspired by his conception of the powers of logic rather than by theological difficulties, though he may well have taken his theological opinions from Ratramnus, and ultimately from Augustine. His opponent Lanfranc (c. 1010-89), then teaching at Bee, likewise found support in Carolingian writings and followed Paschasius Radbert. Berengarius was excommunicated in a Roman synod in 1050, and after imprisonment professed the current orthodox teaching. He continued nevertheless to put out his old opinion, denying any change of ‘nature’ or ‘essence’ in the consecrated elements, and asserting Christ’s presence to be merely con¬ ceptual [intellectuale). This called forth Lanfranc's On the body and blood of the Lord, which asserted as orthodox and defined in precise terms the change of substance from bread and wine to the ‘essence’ of the Lord’s body while the ‘appearance’ (species) remained without change. Berengarius answered in his On the Lord’s Supper that the change which occurred was purely spiritual and refused to admit that the material bread and wine were replaced by the body and blood of Christ. A profession of orthodoxy was once more required of him at Rome in 1079, though he probably remained at heart of his old opinion. Despite his chequered career, he remained an active and respected teacher of dialectic till his death. Probably his

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difficulties, as some modern critics have suggested, were grammatical rather than theological, and were based on the intimate connection which he held to exist between a word and the thing of which it is the expression. Words to him were things on another plane and it was therefore impossible for the bread in the priest’s hand (hoc) to be (est) at the same moment the body of Christ (corpus meum). Nevertheless, Lanfranc did no more than maintain what had long become the accepted teaching of the western church, that the bread was changed into the body of Christ, and he used the new dialectic to express this in set terms for the first time. His presentation was accepted as orthodox and adequate, and the term transubstantiation, though not in fact employed by Lanfranc (it was probably a coinage of Peter Damian) came into common use and was ultimately given the highest sanction by Innocent III and the Fourth Lateran Council. It was indeed a clear statement in the current philosophical vocabulary, that of Boethius, of what the ordinary reflecting literate Christian in western Europe believed. Thus the Berengarian programme, which was essentially an attempt to present a mystery in terms of dialectic, was countered by confining the orthodox theologian to a philosophical terminology. The advantage of the term ‘transubstantiation’ was that it asserted without compromise or confusion the ‘real’ presence of Christ, both physical and spiritual, in the sacred elements. The disadvantage, in addition to that of defining a mystery by a philosophical term which might some day cease to be significant for some minds, was that it gave a handle to crude and materialistic imaginations about the host as merely veiling a physical body. This could be countered by an elaborate metaphysical analysis of substance and accident, but it remained a danger on the lower levels of mental and spiritual competence. On the other hand, it certainly encouraged devotion to the reserved sacrament as providing Christ’s presence in a church, and to processions and blessings in which the host was revered as Christ. The Eucharistic hymns of Aquinas, in particular the ‘O hidden God, devoutly I adore thee’ (Adoro Te devote, latens Deitas) expressed this to perfection. Moreover, by emphasizing the presence of the Incarnate Son, Jesus, son also of Mary, upon the altar it helped to strengthen the tendency, long present in the west, to regard the Mass primarily as a sacrificial act of the priest for and on behalf of the laity, and thus to obscure other aspects of the Eucharist, dear to the Greek and Latin Fathers, as the offering of the mystical body of sanctified humanity to the Father as God by Christ the Head of the Church, and thus the principal means of uniting the faithful in and into Christ’s mystical body. 2. Anselm of Bee and Canterbury If Lanfranc is the first medieval theologian to use dialectic in controversy and definition, Anselm of Bee and Canterbury (1033-1109) is the first to use the reasoning mind with the specifically scholastic purpose of penetrating revealed truth. His celebrated mot d’ordre, his programmatic phrase, fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking to understand, reverses the Berengarian aim. While the dialectician aimed at reducing theology to logic or meta¬ physics, Anselm hoped to advance in theological insight by means of

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intellectual enquiry directed by a mind illuminated by God. In the realm of speculative theology, which he was the first medieval thinker to inhabit, he is chiefly remembered for the cause he assigned for the Incarnation, the answer to the question he had asked: Cur Deus homo? Why did God become man? Christian thought had given several replies to this question and to the consequent one: how was man redeemed? Many Greek fathers had seen in the Incarnation, taken by itself, the basic redemption of the human race. The uniting of a human nature to the divine in the Person of the Son elevated the whole human race to a supernatural destiny. Others, and especially the early Latin fathers, saw in the Passion and death of Christ the sole and sufficient agency of redemption. Sin, disobedience and lack of love were redeemed by the obedience and love of Christ. St. Leo the Great gave to the west a classic expression of this (cf. his Letter 28 to Flavian, Archbishop of Constantinople, commonly called ‘the Tome’, e.g. ‘And this nativity [of the Only Begotten] which took place in time took nothing from, and added nothing to that divine and eternal birth, but expended itself wholly on the restoration of man who had been deceived: in order that he might both vanquish death and overthrow by his strength the Devil who possessed the power of death. For we should not now be able to overcome the author of sin and death unless He took our nature on Him and made it his own, whom neither sin could pollute nor death retain’). Mankind lay under the dominion of sin; no mere man could give due satisfaction to God - or in other words submerge man’s failing in an ocean of love. Nor could God, as God. But a divine Person who had assumed human nature could do so. Concurrently with these two opinions, another stream of tradition regarded man as the slave of the devil, irredeemable save by the payment to his master of a death that was wholly unmerited. This was the so-called ‘ransom’ theory, of which an alternative took the form of regarding the death of Christ, the just man, brought about by diabolical malice in ignorance of Christ’s divinity, as having transgressed the limits of the devil’s just claim to sinful humanity. These two last opinions, especially the former, which Augustine had regarded with favour, had become very general in the west since the sixth century. Anselm's presentation was a fuller version of the familiar argument of St. Leo. Only a sinless man who was also God could satisfy for man’s sin, which had in it an infinite quality as being an offence against an infinite Being. Anselm thus firmly rejected the ransom theory and the supposition that the powers of darkness had rights. Besides Cur Deus homo Anselm composed treatises on Predestination and Free Will, on the Trinity and on the Procession of the Holy Ghost from Father and Son. He made it his boast that he departed not at all from the teaching of Augustine, and the claim is justified in so far as he made no great advances from Augustine’s position, or even from his phraseology, but Anselm’s style and method are consistently clear and luminous, lacking both the frequent lapses into flatness, and the rhetorical colours and inimitable flashes of sublimity of his model. The treatise on the Holy Ghost

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was read to the fathers of the council of Bari, and used in their pronounce¬ ments against the teaching of the eastern church. Beyond and above all these writings, Anselm’s fame throughout the centuries rests principally upon his so-called ‘ontological’ argument for the existence of God propounded in his Proslogion. This argument, which has had the singular fortune to be attacked by Aquinas and Kant, and accepted in the main by Bonaventure, Scotus, Descartes, Leibniz and Hegel, cannot be discussed in full here. Thinkers of the modern world are still as divided as were Anselm’s contemporaries. Is it a logical fallacy, an illicit transference from the realm of ideas to that of existent being? Is it an endeavour to rationalize a mystical experience? Or is it not so much an argument in logical form as a true and cogent intuition, that once the reality of being and existence is perceived by the mind, the metaphysical necessity of infinite existent being is already present in the mind’s consciousness? The originality of Anselm as a thinker is unquestioned. To pass from Berengarius and Lanfranc to him, and then to pass again to John of Salisbury or Gilbert de la Porree, is to step for a moment out of the Middle Ages and enter the presence of one who, like Plato and Aristotle, transcends his age and remains for all time as a thinker and as a person. Though his debt to Augustine is immense, he is no more a second Augustine than Augustine is a second Plotinus. He stands alone in his age, and has no followers approaching to his stature. Though he is in a sense the father of scholastic theology, in another sense his formula of thought died with him; Boethius, not Aristotle, was his unacknowledged master. His method is, like that of Socrates, to follow where the argument of reason leads, and his limpid monologue succeeds as none had done since Plato, in giving the illusion of complete spontaneity, with the additional narcotic of personal charm. He does not employ the techniques of analysis and dialectical opposition; that was yet to come. Whereas the scholastics of the thirteenth century, from Albert onwards, use the findings of reason as a foundation and buttress of revealed truth, Anselm first accepts the truth (fides) and then penetrates it with the reason, spiritually enlightened (intellectus). It remained for another generation to decide whether Anselm, in the fresh dawn of Europe’s adolescence, gave to reason powers and rights beyond its due. 3. Abelard The peer of Anselm in mental power, and a contrast in all else, Abelard (1079-1142) is primarily a thinker rather than a theologian. Contrary to earlier opinion, recent scholarship has considered his influence on medieval theology to have been greater than that of Anselm. Whereas the latter lives for us because he illuminates familiar truths, Abelard used his great critical powers and lucid mind to clear away mist and rubble with which his predecessors had obscured truth. Both lived in a climate of exhilaration in the powers of reason, but whereas Anselm held that human intelligence could go far in its understanding of divine truth, Abelard came near to subjecting that truth to rational criticism and analysis. Abelard turned to theology only in 1121, as a new world to conquer.

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Neither by training nor by cast of mind was he a theologian according to the classical definition of Aquinas, as one who contemplates divine truth and imparts to others what he has seen. His attitude was that of one who uses his powers of reasoning to explain the faith as far as possible in rational terms, and to perfect its expression so as to remove what is illogical or unacceptable. Nevertheless, his acute and fearless mind left a greater mark on theological method than did any other before Aquinas, and in several respects he pointed the way that was to be followed by all in a later age. Abelard’s first important work in this field was his Christian Theology, composed to meet the demand of his pupils for a comprehensive survey of Christian teaching that should include an explanation of difficult points. Abelard’s reply, by its name and by its content, gave a new meaning, which was to become universal, to the word theology. Hitherto used according to its etymology for the knowledge of God (as in ‘mystical’ and ‘natural’ theology), it now signified the discipline concerned with the Christian doctrine in its fulness, including the whole of faith and morals. On his way through Christian doctrine, Abelard used the methods of the schools of logic and dialectic of which he had been a consummate master. The new dialectic found in the doctrine of the Trinity, with its use of the strictly defined terms ‘nature’ and ‘person’, and its apparent relevance to the problem of universals (three Persons, one God) an irresistible attraction and pitfall. Roscelin, who allowed only a verbal reality to universal terms, applied this teaching to the divinity, and became at least verbally unortho¬ dox by admitting the existence of three divine beings. Abelard, in reaction, regarded the names of the divine Persons as little more than attributes or appropriations - Power, Wisdom and Love — of a single God. He trod on dangerous ground also when he touched the central point of Christology. Concerned to safeguard the transcendence of the Divinity, Abelard regarded the human nature of Christ as ‘nothing’ (nihil) to the divine Person. This opinion was adopted by Roland Bandinelli, by Peter Lombard, and in part by Gilbert de la Porree, and spread widely in France and later in Germany. Later, Bandinelli, by now Pope Alexander III, after twice forbidding discussion for or against this opinion, finally (1177) condemned it. On another topic of Christology, the doctrine of Redemption, Abelard was equally daring. He reacted against the legal or forensic implications of both the ‘ransom’ and the ‘adequate satisfaction’ interpretations of the Incarna¬ tion and Passion. His views were to some degree changeable, but for a considerable time at least he regarded as sufficient the ‘exemplary’ purpose of the Incarnation, as being necessary to instruct and stimulate mankind in the perfect love of God. On this view the Passion of Christ was the supreme example of self-abandonment in Christ’s unhesitating championship of truth against error. This view had a supporter in Peter Lombard, though he gave equal value to the ‘ransom’ opinion. Abelard reacted also against the current Augustinian conception of original sin as implying a physical weakness, almost a moral disease of mind and will, manifested in concupiscence. In his view it was simply a penalty, the loss of a title to eternal beatitude. Grace in consequence became an assistance rather than an essential, physical enablement for meritorious

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action. Here he was opposed by St. Bernard, who repeated the traditional view in his treatise on grace, but both Bernard and Abelard left the manner of action of grace undefined, to await further clarification from Aquinas. In another field, that of ethics and the analysis of good and evil actions, Abelard's influence was strong and beneficent. In the countries of the west, gradually converted and without any higher education or culture, the Christian life was regarded as the accomplishment of the ten command¬ ments and those of Christ and the Church, and it was common (as it has always been common among those without either human or spiritual discernment) to regard as sinful any breach of a commandment (e.g. that of fasting on certain days) under any conditions and even through ignorance and forgetfulness. Abelard in his Scito te ipsum (Know thyself) declared the necessity of full knowledge, advertence and intention before moral guilt could be imputed, and thereby proclaimed the rights and responsibility of the individual conscience. A man acted rightly if he did what his conscience bade him do here and now, and his will and intention to do right was the significant criterion. Abelard would have made his own in an ethical sense Hamlet’s words: ‘There’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’. He does not seem to have realized fully the deeper psychology of an act: that what we think now is largely conditioned by past thoughts and actions. When he used the words of Christ: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’, to prove the innocence of those who crucified Christ, his readers felt that he had concealed the force of the second word. They needed forgiveness, for the gospel narrative itself shows them as gratuitously cruel and brutal, and therefore prone to evil, even if they did not, in the circumstances, incur the guilt of killing the Son of God. Without such reservations, the door is open to moral relativism or, in the medieval context, to nominalist ethics - that good and bad are words of no meaning; merely signs by which we denote the arbitrary commands and prohibitions of God. Nevertheless, Abelard’s doctrine was in itself sound, and it gradually passed into common currency. In addition to these and other doctrinal novelties and aberrations, Abelard’s approach to theology inevitably roused hostility in conservative quarters for two reasons. His reverence for the philosophy of the ancients, such as Cicero, of whom he had little firsthand knowledge, was very great. He regarded them as harbingers of Christianity, and saw in the resemblances to Christian teaching in their works a divine adumbration of revealed truth. Even the Trinity, he held, had been dimly perceived by them. This attitude fell in with his exaggeration of the powers of the human mind in its use of dialectic, which could, so he maintained, demonstrate and explain the mysteries of the faith. Here we touch upon what was to opponents such as Bernard the basic error of Abelard. He approached the truths of the faith not primarily as rich veins of precious metal to be excavated, refined and moulded by reverent thought, or as depths to be scanned with patience and humility, but as verbal formulae to be explained and extended and used as major and minor in a syllogistic argument. Such an attitude and such deductions, proposed brilliantly to generations of eager students, rapidly became deformed and exaggerated, and critics and enemies, as always in

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the history of the church, delated to authority expressions and even opinions which could be deduced from his words, but which he himself had not held. As for Abelard himself, it seems clear that he wished always to follow the teaching of the church. His condemnations at Soissons and Sens, and the attacks of Bernard and others on his authentic or reputed teaching, had their effect in silencing his followers and diminishing the copies of his works, but many of his opinions won their way in generations to come. 4. The problem of reordination A theological issue of great practical significance, long debated in the past, recurred to exercise minds in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This was the reordination of heretical, schismatic and otherwise irregular clergy before admission or re-admission to the exercise of their orders. The matter was controversial owing to the lack of precision in defining the nature and effects of the various sacraments, and a failure to recognize seven, and only seven, sacraments as distinguished from other customary rites such as the ceremonial washing of feet. In particular, the teaching, later to become classical, of the indelible ‘character’ bestowed on the soul by the sacraments of baptism, confirmation and holy orders had not yet been explicitly formulated. In the early church, both eastern and western, a long and often acrimonious controversy had been carried on as to the necessity of rebap¬ tizing heretics and schismatics. St. Cyprian was the protagonist of the rebaptizers in Africa, but the decision of the church, as expressed by Rome, went against him. This decision, diffused by the writings of St. Augustine, was final and became universal, but the problem of reordination was a longer business. St. Augustine defended what was later to become the official doctrine, but others, shocked at the supposition that the sacred powers of the priesthood should survive a lapse into heresy or apostasy, or be unaffected by excommunication, demanded reordination on repentance. Roman practice failed to show consistency; there was some confusion between the powers of holy orders and those of jurisdiction, and this affected the pronouncement of Innocent I, that no one could give what he did not possess, which was quoted for centuries by the reordainers. The difficulty presented itself frequently between the seventh and twelfth centuries owing to the wide and ill-defined conception of heresy then current. Thus in England after the council of Whitby there was a debate concerning the orders of the clergy who held to Celtic practices, and arch¬ bishop Theodore, with memories of current practice in the east and at Rome, introduced reordination. It was maintained by archbishop Egbert of York and appeared as normal in insular penitentials. A century later it was a useful excuse for retaliation in the feuds, scandals and irregular elections at Rome, and nullification of orders and compulsory reordination of opponents by victorious partisans was common, as e.g., after the antipope Constan¬ tine II (767-9) and pope Formosus (891-6). Between these two occasions, the issue of the most vexatious of all the tussles of archbishop Hincmar of Rheims hung upon the status of the clerks ordained by his rival Ebbo after his irregular resumption of office as bishop. The reform movement of the eleventh century brought the question into

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full daylight. Simony (the act of buying or selling ecclesiastical office, from Simon Magus, Acts 8:18-19) and incontinence in a priest or bishop were ‘heresies’ to be fought with every canonical weapon. Were those found guilty of those faults, and as such excommunicated, any longer priests or bishops? If so, one granted the transmission of orders and all means of sanctification to heretics and backsliders, and now that the fight for reform was engaged all over Europe, this would be to put the enemy on an equality with the children of light. In the general clash of politics and personalities the principal theologians differed among themselves and popes acted incon¬ sistently. Peter Damian, whose teaching ultimately triumphed and won for him the title of doctor of the church, and the canonist Cardinal Deusdedit, were against reordination, while the extremist Cardinal Humbert and the canonist Anselm of Lucca, later pope as Alexander II, were for it. Leo IX, Gregory VII and Urban II were inconsistent in practice. In an age of theological development and pamphlet warfare all kinds of procedural solutions were proposed. One school was for obliging reconciled heretics to submit to a new laying-on of hands, though the anointing and other ceremonies could be omitted. Another school took the complicated view that ordination ‘within the church’ remained valid (that is, a bishop who had fallen into ‘heresy’ still retained episcopal orders and could validly ordain), while ordinations ‘without the church’ were invalid (that is, a priest or bishop ordained by an orthodox bishop turned heretic could not himself ordain or consecrate). The question had not received theological settlement when Gratian and Peter Lombard compiled their manuals in the mid¬ twelfth century, but in practice reordination was becoming rare, and it was finally eliminated by the precisions effected by the theologians of the late twelfth and early thirteenth century on the matter of sacramental ‘character’. 5. The influence of Bernard Strange as it would have seemed to earlier generations, to say nothing of contemporaries in the twelfth century, modern historians of medieval thought and theology often go near to forgetting St. Bernard. While he dominates the political and spiritual life of the age, it is true that as regards the evolution of the scholastic method and the development of theology he might never have existed, save as a persecutor of those who sought new ways. Yet he had a unique position in the mental life of the times, a position in this respect alone not unlike that held by Newman a century ago. Read by all men in monastic and ecclesiastical circles, and immensely influential with individuals, Bernard’s treatises influenced Abelard and Gilbert de la Porree no more than Newman’s essay on the development of doctrine in¬ fluenced the European theologians who were about to create neo-Thomism in the late nineteenth century. Bernard indeed was the last of the fathers; when all around him was changing, he continued to compose as monuments of his genius the meditative monographs of a kind that had been the vehicle for all western theology from the days of Augustine to the eleventh century. Here was no sic et non, no anthology of authorities, no dialectic. Bernard treated the old questions, such as grace, predestination, the Incarnation and

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the rest, with broad traditional arguments and his own incomparable rhetoric. He was widely read, but by monks and churchmen rather than by masters in the schools, and when a century later he became an ‘authority’, he was cited as the fathers were cited, and like them, his opinions counted for much in the long run, though his influence was perhaps at its greatest in the border country between devotional writing and formal theology. In his lifetime he was known in the schools as the watch-dog of tradition and the repressor of originality and the advance-guard. Modern research which has been kind to Abelard and Gilbert has set Bernard in a truer light, as a conservative indeed, but also as a theologian of spiritual depth. While Bernard failed to see that the mind of a Europe attaining its mental majority must use disciplines and discuss problems that to him seemed trivial, Abelard was more concerned with the intellectual superstructure of theological thought than in its rich doctrinal foundation, and regarding theology as a province in which the reason and a particular dialectical method could explore and explain. When the final balance of influence is calculated, it may well be that Bernard did what he alone of his age could have done. He ‘contained’ the new dialectic at a moment when it might have washed away all landmarks, and ensured that theology should remain a matter of traditional faith rather than of mental gymnastics. 6. The Virgin Mary During the medieval centuries considerable development took place in the discussion of the privileged position of the Virgin Mary in the Christian economy, and this can be traced more conveniently in a separate section than if it is parcelled out chronologically. Her physical virginity before, during and after the birth of her Son, the justice of her title as Mother of God and Second Eve, her fulness of grace implying absolute sinlessness throughout life, were elements of the faith received from the patristic age. At the beginning of our period liturgical commemoration of her was almost entirely restricted to the group of festivals around Christmas, including the Circumcision, the Epiphany and the presentation of the child Jesus in the temple — which she shared with her son. Later, as we have seen, largely owing to the series of Greek popes from southern Italy, and the influx of eastern Christians driven from their homes by Persian and Muslim invaders, a further group developed, including the Annunciation (25 March), the Birthday (8 September) and the Assumption (15 August). The lastnamed feast became a principal landmark of the summer liturgy, and the bodily assumption into ‘heaven’, though not to be defined by Rome for thirteen centuries, was commonly accepted in the west, largely through eastern traditions, and was never seriousfy questioned, though some of the apocryphal documents purporting to describe it were treated with suspicion. Both the liturgy and the iconography of the great cathedrals of France are evidence of its universal acceptance, and from the eleventh century onwards devotion to Mary, hitherto pictured in art as the regal Mother holding her Son for the homage of worshippers, was now directed to the maiden of the Annunciation or the advocate by the judgment seat. The matter of her sinless conception, the question, that is, of the

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preservation of her soul from the stain of original sin from the first moment of its existence, had not been debated before the eleventh century. It had been implicitly held in the eastern church as a consequence of Mary’s absolute fulness of grace, and of her position as second Eve, repairing by her faith and innocence what the first woman had lost, but the east had never shared with the west its preoccupation with the problems of grace and evil, and western expositions of devotion to Mary, as in the writings of St. Ambrose, had always maintained a great sobriety of language. Meanwhile the feast of the conception of Mary had become common in the eastern church and its outposts in south Italy. At the end of the tenth century monks from Greek Basilian monasteries in the south moved north¬ wards, founding abbeys such as Grotta Ferrata in the Alban hills and SS. Alexius and Sabas on the outskirts of Rome, and it was doubtless from this source, by way of pilgrims or exiles from the east, that the liturgical celebration of the feast of the Conception reached some Old English monasteries, among them the Canterbury and Winchester houses and Worcester. This feast, celebrated on 8 or 9 December, did not commemorate the Immaculate Conception as it was later understood. It had been insti¬ tuted in the east on the analogy of that celebrating the marvellous con¬ ception and sanctification of John the Baptist as related by St. Luke, and it rested on a similar, but legendary, account of the miraculous conception of Mary by her mother, and the accompanying sanctification of Mary’s soul. It did not rest upon, or itself express, a precise doctrinal basis, and was celebrated without any direct account being taken of original sin. The feast was suppressed at the Norman Conquest along with other Old English liturgical practices, but was reintroduced early in the twelfth century by abbot Anselm, nephew and namesake of the archbishop of Canterbury, who had been abbot of St. Sabas in Rome before becoming abbot of Bury St. Edmund’s in 1121. Shortly before this the writings of St. Anselm had laid stress on Mary’s absolute purity from sin, and the archbishop’s con¬ fidant and biographer, Eadmer, wrote a treatise in defence of the reintro¬ duced feast. In this, he provided the first western theological statement on the Immaculate Conception — that is, that the soul of Mary never incurred the stain of original sin — based on Greek sources and what is called the argument of suitability. Though frequently quoted later, this had no wide effect at the time, for attention was diverted by the well-known attack of St. Bernard upon the liturgical celebrations of the Conception by the canons of Lyons, a church with a long tradition of connections with eastern devotion. This began a theological controversy that lasted for more than two centuries. St. Bernard, whose intense devotion to the Mother of God was well known, took exception to what was to him a novel doctrine. Not only did it infringe the universal law of original sin in the children of Adam, but it seemed to Bernard unfitting in itself. He, with his contemporaries, understood the term conception in an active sense, and accepting the ruling Augustinian opinion that original sin was transmitted by an act induced by concupiscence, maintained that this act and its effect were in a sense sinful and certainly not a suitable object for a cult. Thenceforward

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the issue was controversial, and even when it was agreed that the word conception was used in a passive, not an active sense (i.e. that it referred to Mary, not to her mother) and that original sin was not transmitted by any act of man, there still remained the theological problem. All human beings need the redemptive merit of Christ, because they are born in original sin. But if Mary had no guilt, not even of original sin, how could she need or receive redemption? In the thirteenth century Aquinas cleared the issue by his teaching that original sin consisted essentially in the absence of grace, not in the quasi-physical transmission of a sinful quality; but after more than one change of opinion during his career, reflected in his writings, he finally decided against immaculate conception, while admitting that Mary was sanctified the moment after her soul had been created. It was left to Scotus to solve the difficulty caused by the need for redemption by teaching that Mary was preserved from original sin by the foreseen merits of Christ. This indeed is the ordinary explanation given by theologians of all personal grace received by the chosen people and others before the Passion of Christ; the only difference in the case of Mary is that the grace was bestowed before there was any (original) sin to remove.

IV THE FIRST CENTURY OF SCHOLASTIC THEOLOGY, c. 1050 -c. 1200 1. Theological education, 600-1160 Before considering the development of teaching and method in theologyin the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it is essential to realize the religious, social and educational background. From the epoch of Gregory I to that of Gregory VII (say, from 600 to 1050) western Christendom was a long and narrow territory stretching from the British Isles to Sicily and from the eastern border of Austria to the Pyrenees. Within the period it had been constricted by the Muslim occupation of Spain (711), and extended from time to time northward and eastward of Frankland and Germany by conquests which did not, before the eleventh century, add any real cultural or spiritual force to the west. Within all this area, with the partial exception of some northern and central Italian cities, no public lay education existed, still less any higher education, whether secular or theological. Speaking generally, only the monks and a majority of the higher clergy were fully literate; many of the bishops were in fact monks, and the higher adminis¬ tration of the country was largely carried out by clerics, many of them bishops and some monks. At the opening of our period such theological and spiritual writing and teaching as there was came from bishops and the higher clergy of their entourage, but the seventh century saw a decrease in episcopal activity and a growth of literacy in the monasteries, and these last became and remained for three hundred years the principal reservoirs of learning. Charlemagne indeed endeavoured to extend education by republishing old decrees which made the establishment of a school at each cathedral obligatory, but these decrees had little immediate effect. In consequence, almost every theological writer between the two great Gregories was a monk. In both monasteries and episcopal schools (where they existed) the education, a ghost of the old Roman rhetorical training, was grammatical and literary, enabling a pupil to read classical and patristic Latin and write both in the quasi-classical style for literary and liturgical purposes, and in less classical Latin for administrative and diplomatic use. The purpose of education, as expressed by theorists such as Alcuin, was to enable the pupil to read and understand the Scriptures, and the crown of the course was the thorough study of the Bible and the commentaries of the fathers thereon. In addition there were the other writings of the fathers among whom Augustine held unrivalled pride of place, followed at a long distance by Gregory the Great, Leo the Great and Jerome and such writers as

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Prosper and Hilary of Poitiers. In addition, the larger cathedrals and some monastic libraries would have copies of the acts of councils, extracts of canon law, papal letters and, in due course, copies of Charlemagne’s voluminous capitularies and the writings of such European figures as Bede and Alcuin. Mention of these two names will remind us that in some chosen places in Europe — Jarrow, York, Tours, Poitiers, Aachen and the north Italian cities - an able scholar had at hand a considerable quantity of material for study, and the bulk of the literature available grew as the decades passed, especially during the century 780-880 covering the socalled Carolingian renaissance. During that epoch, indeed, an attempt was made by Alcuin and others to create an educational system, but the troubles of the time were against the movements, and the only permanent result was a rise in the quality of the best monastic literature. But while the renaissance lasted it gave rise, as we have seen, to a number of theological controversies in which the leaders, from Alcuin to Hincmar, showed a wide knowledge of Augustine and later Latin writers, and an ability to marshal their evidence from Scripture and tradition. If evidence were needed of the high degree of technical competence present in the Frankish empire, it could be found in the productions of the group, wherever it may have been situated, that composed the various documents known as the ‘false decretals’ and their companions. With the liquidation of the Carolingian empire all evidence of theological training, apart from the informal teaching of the monastery, is absent for more than a century. The revival, when it came, was part of the wider rebirth of all intellectual activities known as the renaissance of the twelfth (more accurately of the eleventh) century. Its forum was the cathedral school, which rose slowly from elementary obscurity into efficient maturity, aided by the contemporary emergence of the individual teacher of dialectic who might be either a permanent member of the cathedral staff, or a free-lance moving from place to place and often taking his pupils with him. While the early masters of the revival were dialecticians, of which class Berengarius, Roscelin and Abelard were members, the discipline aided the rise of theologians also, among whom Lanfranc and his disciple Anselm were preeminent. These two, and Abelard also, were monks, but the typical masters of the age were the heads of the cathedral schools such as Chartres, Rheims, Laon and Paris. In these the central influence was that of the Chancellor or, by delegation, the master of the schools. Chartres in par¬ ticular, for a century between Fulbert and Gilbert de la Porree, developed a curriculum of grammar, dialectic and scripture in which the last-named developed into a doctrinal study. The method of teaching on the higher levels of the course was by lectures on the Bible and its official gloss or commentary, and towards the end of the eleventh century the practice began for masters to compose Sentences or Flores, that is, collections of texts from the Scripture or councils bearing upon a particular point of doctrine. Of a large group of masters who were composing ordered arrays of texts of this kind Ansellus (or Anselmus) of Laon was the most distinguished in the early twelfth century. By a natural development these Sentences came to include a number of opinions or

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judgments on the theological issues and the term sententia gradually shifted its reference from the authority to the commentator; from denoting a selection of authoritative passages it became a collection of pronouncements or opinions of a teaching master. Finally, as Sententiae multiplied attempts were made to consolidate or harmonize their conclusions in Summae sententiarum (handbooks of doctrine). Hitherto dialectic and theology had been two separate disciplines, and although men such as Berenganus, Roscelin and the young Abelard had made use of theological propositions regarding the Trinity or the Eucharist as matter for dialectical analysis, while conversely theologians such as Lanfranc and Anselm had used dialectic as a technique for investigating theological truth, there was, until about 1100, a very clear distinction between the schools and masters of dialectic and those of ‘the sacred page’, as the Bible when studied came to be called. Abelard, always an innovator, did more than any other man to effect what would be currently called a ‘break-through’. In early life he had used the Trinity as matter for dialectic, and soon afterwards he had adopted from the canonists the technique of methodical doubt or, as it came to be called from one of his treatises, the method of Sic et non (as we should say, the method of pros and cons). But the true moment of fusion came after he had turned from dialectic to theology, when he answered the demand of his pupils to give them a picture of the whole field of doctrine, to explain its difficult parts and to give rational arguments in it support. Meanwhile two other minds of great distinction were at work. At the newly-founded abbey of St. Victor at Paris, a canon of the house named Hugh was accomplishing in a discursive, Augustinian fashion, a summary of the whole economy of creation, redemption and sanctification, while Gilbert de la Porree, bishop of Poitiers, who like Abelard was a dialectician, but a Platonist and a patristic scholar to boot, was translating revealed truth into his own vocabulary and language. Since many students passed through more than one school, the streams of Abelardian criticism, Victorine contemplation, and Platonic exemplarism were beginning to merge in the later Summae Sententiarum. Concurrently, the study of canon law was developing on similar lines. The collections of earlier times had at first been haphazard, and then increasingly ‘loaded’ in the days of the investiture controversy, and finally more comprehensive and orderly under Ivo of Chartres and others. The canonists, however, were stimulated by the civilians or Roman lawyers, who from c. 1100 had a classical text, the Digest of Justinian, to attract their commentaries. The canonists too felt an urgent need for a text-book, and the need was met by a Camaldolese monk Gratian who, c. 1140, produced his Concordia discordantium canonum, a ‘resolution of conflicting decrees’, in which he combined the advantages of the Summae sententiarum and methodical doubt. Gratian’s achievement in the field of canon law and its immediate success may have been the impulse that produced a similar union of methods in theology. Peter the Lombard, who may himself have been a pupil of Abelard, and who was now a master at Paris, published c. 1150 what came to be known as The Four Books of the Sentences, in which

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the whole content of Jewish and Christian revelation, and the economy of the Christian life, were set out. As in Gratian’s Concordia, so in the Lombard’s Sentences the framework of contradictory texts and ultimate resolution was derived from Abelard’s Sic et non. It became at once the sole and sufficient text-book for students of theology; it invited comment and soon became the text to which masters added their criticisms, explanations and additions. For more than four centuries it was the regular duty of the young bachelor in theology to read the Sentences as baccalaureus sententiarius, and the writing of a commentary on the Sentences was the inevitable prelude to a successful career as master. Bonaventure, Aquinas, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham were only the most celebrated names in a great army. During the twelfth century the academical teaching of theology took shape. In the new universities, whether student-universities as at Bologna, or master-universities as at Paris, the Arts course formed the first stage, in which logic and dialectic were studied with ever-increasing elaboration, and were fortified in the thirteenth century by increasing doses of Aristotelian philosophy. Concurrently the framework of a university in the modern sense of the word grew up — faculties, examinations and degrees, set books and lectures, Chancellor and regent masters. The course of theology, like those of medicine and canon law, began after the bachelor’s degree in arts had been taken, and was elaborate and lengthy, and in practice relatively few proceeded to the mastership or what later became the doctorate in divinity. Officially, the course in arts was confined to the techniques of thought and argument, logic and dialectic, and all questions connected with theology were banned, such as the immortality of the soul; but in practice philosophy in all its various branches, including psychology and the origins of the world, was often introduced. Conversely, the technique and methodology of logic and dialectic were carried over into theology. Topics which Plato treated in dialogue form and Aristotle in a treatise were now fed into the process of dialectic, and all spoken and written teaching was expressed in syllogisms and disputation. Thus the whole of the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas is built up of multitudinous articles cast in sic et non form, often opening with a question, such as: ‘Does God exist?’ (Utrum Deus sit?), and even the apparently continuous and often lengthy statement in which Aquinas gives judgment can usually be broken down into an elaborate syllogism. Academic exercises and a master’s monographs were alike 'disputations’. The whole of scholastic theology was conditioned by its logical and dialectical basis, and though in the golden age the greatest masters - Alexander of Hales, Albert, Bonaventure and Thomas - sub¬ ordinated their method to the fabric of speculative or spiritual truth which they built upon it, the purely logical and dialectical elements, reinforced to some extent by mathematics in England, reasserted their potency in the fourteenth century, and the essence of theological truth was neglected for the brilliance of the mental exercise. Yet however true this may be, the formal method in the thirteenth century must not be allowed to conceal from us the deep theological wisdom of the greatest masters. Above and beyond their scholastic method and

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their philosophical background a Bonaventure or an Aquinas, and lesser men as well, were theologians of the first order. They were steeped in the Scriptures more thoroughly than many modern divines, and their personal lives of apostolic ministry, private prayer and constant reflection on the truths of the Christian faith gave them a spiritual insight and wisdom which enabled them to look upon details and conclusions as the outward expression of spiritual realities. Whereas some of the masters of logic and dialectic subordinated doctrinal pronouncements to technical manipulation, the great masters of theology penetrated and absorbed the reality of the Incarnation by a kind of natural sympathy with the mystery and the divine Person - a connaturality, to use their own word. Here, rather than in new dogmatic or credal affirmations, lies the significance of the scholastics. 2. Canon Law and the Sacraments In the middle years of the twelfth century an epoch in the history of western theology was ending. For a century great men had succeeded one another - Lanfranc, Anselm, Abelard, Bernard, Gilbert de la Porree - and a series of controversies had led to important treatises and declarations. The monastic centuries ended with the death of Bernard, the cathedral schools were losing ground to the nascent universities, and with Gratian and Peter Lombard the novel critical methods and the disputed opinions of yesterday became matter for the text-book and the lecture-hall. The fifty years that followed appear as a kind of interlunary twilight. In thought and theology there is no great name of the first rank between Bernard and Gilbert, on the one hand, and Alexander of Hales and Robert Grosseteste on the other. Yet it was not a stagnant age. If there were no supreme thinkeis, there were hosts of masters and a growing number of text-books, and the framework of university life was rapidly assembling, while un¬ observed in Spain and Sicily the translators of Aristotle - Avicenna, Averroes and Maimonides - were preparing the new material for the scholastics of the golden age. Moreover, it was a century of law. The lawyers, both canonists and civilians, had found their text-books, organized their uni¬ versities, and risen to great place in the church fifty years or more before the schools of Paris reached maturity. Historians of theology and canon law have not always appreciated the very considerable influence of the canonists in the development of doctrinal expression. In every field of Christian worship and discipline, practice, the outward manifestation of common conviction, has always run ahead of theory and definition. The established way of acting as well as the estab¬ lished form of prayer may create the established formulae of belief. If this had always been so, it became far more evident in an age when papal decisions, often based on a mixture of law and practice, became at once firm precedents and definitions of doctrine. The sacraments, for example, and in particular the discipline of penance and holy orders, had been constantly topics for legislation and papal decision, and the tradition thus established had been expressed or modified by canonists in their ordinary task of presenting and explaining the law. It was in the realm of sacramental theology that the twelfth century saw

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undoubted progress. Hitherto in the west, as in the east to the present day. Baptism and the Eucharist had stood pre-eminent as rites conveying particular gifts of grace. The anointing and laying on of hands at confirma¬ tion, holy orders and the visitation of the sick were also generally regarded as ‘sacraments' of divine institution, but the double ambiguity of the word sacrament, both verbal (either ‘mystery’ or ‘bestowal of sanctification’) and in its loose application to any established practice of devotion, long hindered an attempt at rigid classification. This was achieved at length by the discussions of Hugh of St. Victor and the Lombard, as was also the distinction between the words by which the grace is bestowed and the material which the minister uses. The exclusive number seven, however, was not defined as a matter of faith until the appearance of the creed or confession approved for the Greeks in 1439. The two sacraments not men¬ tioned above, Penance and Matrimony, were long in entering the final list partly because of their intractibility in complying with definitions and analysis, but chiefly because of the long development of penance and the existence of matrimony in other legal systems and with other social customs, both before and after the foundation of the church by Christ. As we have seen, the practice and virtual obligation of auricular con¬ fession for all, and its frequent use by the devout, were well established in the west before 1100, but the theology was still fluid. Was confession to a priest merely a dispensation from the regime of public penance and re¬ admission to communion by the bishop? Were the powers of the priest merely delegated, or did the bishop simply give permission for the priest to use powers bestowed on him at his ordination? Did the priest absolve from sin, or merely declare the sm to have been remitted, or simply pray for its remission? What disposition was needed in the penitent? If he were fully contrite what more could absolution give? If not, how could it give any¬ thing? Can forgiveness be obtained without confession and, if not, what obligation of confession exists? Some of these questions were settled by practice and law before the theologians had answered them satisfactorily, but the Lombard was able to set out formally the three constituent elements, of confession, contrition and satisfaction. The nature of the contrition required and the direct effect of absolution were topics to be discussed for many centuries to come. In practice the decree Omnis utriusque sexus (cf. p. 240 above), making an annual confession to the parish priest the condition of full membership of the church, was the final and universal establishment of a primary duty for those with the care of souls. One of its results was to multiply manuals intended to help the physician of souls; another was to make the new orders of friars coadjutors and rivals of the secular clergy in their most intimate relationships with their flock. Matrimony, though more simple in its theology and performance, was to remain the most complicated in administration. Custom and scriptural authority, old and new, had erected a forest of obstacles based on relation¬ ship, natural and spiritual, and on status, social custom and personal engagement, while the church had never, in the first millennium of her existence, imposed an absolute obligation of the presence of a priest for

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lawfulness or validity. As the medieval centuries passed, the impediments of relationship were rationalized and the obligation of receiving the blessing of the church strengthened, but it was not till the days of the council of Trent that the clandestine marriage was pronounced invalid, and the ceremony of betrothal was deprived of obligations and consequences almost as solemn as those of matrimony. 3. Heresy Heresy is a ‘loaded’ word, and when used by theologians it implies false¬ hood of doctrine as opposed to orthodox truth. The historian as such does not consider the truth or falsehood of opinions, but their relationship to the official teaching of the church concerned. Regarded thus, heresy may be merely an extravagant, temporary aberration, or it may be the seed from which a separate and abiding body of Christians take their growth. A heresy, therefore, may be very relevant to a history of theology. Writers in the past have often regarded the ‘ages of faith’ as an epoch when orthodoxy was universal and heresy rare and uninfluential. Recently, however, it has been recognized that for a century or more (1150-1250) organized heresy was rife in the western church, and presented a serious challenge to authority, both lay and ecclesiastical. In the early pages of this study we noted the last of the great Christological controversies, that on the single will of Christ. Like its predecessors, it was a theological dispute, albeit rising out of political circumstances, and one in which highly placed and reputedly orthodox ecclesiastics were divided in opinion, and which was finally decided by conciliar and papal decree. The subsequent controversy over the honour to be paid to images was of a different kind, but this too was a dispute between parties who in other respects were orthodox Christians. From that time, for more than two centuries in the west, there was no division of opinion worthy of the name of heresy, and until the end of the eleventh century the rare appear¬ ances of heterodoxy (excluding the so-called heresies of simony and Nicolaism) were isolated outbreaks of antinomian, reformist or illuminist disturbances which were usually suppressed with violence and ease by popular reaction or authority. (Nicolaism means clerical incontinence - its derivation is unknown.) Early in the twelfth century these revolts became more serious. They were at first mainly directed against targets, such as the simoniacal and worldly clergy, at which contemporary Gregorian reformers also were aiming, and some historians have seen in these revolutionaries the extreme ‘left wing’ of an orthodox reform. Arnold of Brescia, for example, a preacher of poverty and a denouncer of slovenly clergy, was finally hanged (1155), not as a heretic, but as an incorrigible agitator. But there was in most of these movements, as in that of Peter de Bruis (d. c. 1140), an attack on sacerdotal and sacramental religion. At about the middle of the century a far more formidable foe to ortho¬ doxy appeared. This was the gradual but ultimately massive infiltration of the Bogomil heresy from the Balkans. This, originally derived from Manichaeism in the east, grew strong in Constantinople and passed through

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Bulgaria and Bosnia along the trade-routes. By about 1140 its adherents were to be found in populous districts all over western Europe: at Cologne, at Rheims, in Lombardy and central Italy, and above all in southern France, in the wealthy and cultured society of Languedoc around Toulouse and Carcassonne. It became known as Catharism from the name Cathari ( = ‘the pure’) given to the proved adepts of the sect. Catharism was not so much a heresy as a new, anti-Christian religion, a kind of shadow-church, and it was this that made it appear sinister to contemporaries. It was a dualistic religion in which the principle of good, the creator of the world of spirit, was opposed by the principle of evil, creator of the world of matter. Souls, fragments of spirit, were enmeshed in material bodies, and in consequence marriage was evil, and the ideal life was one of chastity, austerity and vegetarian food. This was in practice attempted by a few only, the leaders and priests of the sect, who gave their name to the whole body. When established in Europe the Catharists used a liturgy which imitated the Eucharist, and set up a hierarchy of ordained ministers similar to that of the church. They held that Christ was the highest of the angels, adopted by God as his son, and that the body of the Lord and his death were appearances only. The strong ties of a united, charitable and quasi-secret organization, with active leaders and a high ideal of austerity which was attained by a few and admired by many, won its way largely through the contrast it provided to the rich, ignorant and unhelpful bishops and priests of the Catholic south of France. When repeated efforts of the neighbouring bishops and later of preachers com¬ missioned by the papacy had failed, and when political motives and intrigues mingled with religious stresses, Innocent III made a twofold attempt to overcome the Albigensians, as they were called from Albi, one of their strongholds. He encouraged missions and preachers, whose central figure came to be St. Dominic, and by means of a crusade from central France brought force to bear under Simon de Montfort. The crusaders, with reputations stained by pillage and massacre, were eventually successful, and the remains of Catharism were gradually obliterated by the Inquisition reorganized for the purpose. Catharism ceased to exist as a rival to the Catholic church, though at a cost of much misery and the debasement of ecclesiastical humanity and justice. Meanwhile, a wholly different movement had sprung up at Lyons and elsewhere and developed in the cities which lay at the foot of the Alpine highlands from south Germany to northern Lombardy. This was made up of several groups, of which the Waldenses, named after Waldo, a merchant of Lyons, were the chief. All preached, in varying measure and detail, a life of poverty in common, with Bible-reading and prayer, and in general a reference for individual piety rather than sacramental and sacerdotal religion. They were the first organized appearance of the simple, congrega¬ tional ‘nonconformity’ that was to spread here and there in Europe during the Middle Ages, and to attain revolutionary stature under Wyclif in England and John Hus in Bohemia. It developed ultimately into a group of churches forming the left wing of the Protestant Reformation. Waldo and many of his followers, and the bulk of some other bodies such

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as the ‘Humiliati’ and Poor Catholics, remained in intention orthodox, and some groups were confirmed as religious companies by Innocent III. Others, denying the Real Presence in the Eucharist and any doctrinal authority in the Pope and bishops, drifted gradually into heresy. They too were harassed by the Inquisition, but they were more difficult to distinguish from ortho¬ doxy, and they continued to live permanently and quietly, some of them Catholics or near-Catholics, coming into prominence here and there, as in Bohemia in the late fourteenth century. In Piedmont the Waldenses, the true proto-Protestants, continued to exist. Taken as a whole, they are remarkable as proposing a programme which contains almost all the features of the early sixteenth-century Reformers apart from those peculiar to Luther and Calvin. In the last century of our period (1250-1350) there was little organized and militant heresy in Europe. In south Germany and the Rhineland there were a few antinomian sects that might seem to foreshadow the Anabaptists, and the beguinages in the cities there and in the Low Countries were often but usually unjustly accused of heresy. The most notorious disturbers of the peace were the groups of Franciscans, soon known as the Spirituals, who campaigned for the literal observance of the rule of St. Francis and later brought upon themselves the charge of heresy as well as schism for their obstinate adherence to the opinion that Christ had owned no property on earth and that all clergy, as well as all friars, were bound to absolute poverty on pain of losing their jurisdiction in the church.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCHOLASTICISM I-. Theological education, 1160-1300 In order to understand the character of the theology of the schools in the thirteenth century, to appreciate their achievement and to assess their limitations, it is necessary to glance at the evolution of theological study and academic practice between the age of Peter Lombard and that of Duns Scotus. While the Lombard was teaching and writing at Paris the university, which for almost four centuries was to be the intellectual centre of Europe, was coming into being. In 1100 all higher education, save that in law, was confined to the cathedral schools, and in particular to those of France north and west of the Loire and including those of southern Flanders - Orleans, Chartres, Paris, Laon, Rheims, Toumai, Liege — in particular. Paris was only one, and not the most famous, of a large group. But Paris had three schools, that of the cathedral on the island in the Seine, that of the abbey of St. Victor, and that of the Mont Sainte Genevieve, and the dazzling genius of Abelard on the Mount, and the steadier flame of Hugh at St. Victor's, attracted crowds to Paris, and the city, a political and social capital already famed for its beauty and hospitality, had advantages shared by no other. Consequently, by 1150 the arts school, an essential preparation for a career in theology, law and medicine, was the most flourishing in northern Europe. Nevertheless, the university as an organization was more than fifty years in developing, and the society or ‘guild’ or ‘university’ of masters did not come into existence before the last decade of the century and was not fully recognized till 1215. Long before that time the large student population had overflowed from the Island to the left bank of the Seine, the Latin quarter of later days. In Abelard’s day no formal qualification was needed for a teacher. He could set up school outside the cathedral precinct and teach what he wished, to students who came of their own choice and were bound by no examinations. Gradually the organization developed. The society or university of masters controlled recruitment to their body and imposed an oath of obedience to its statutes. The title of master, hitherto given as an honorific to all distinguished teachers, was restricted to one who, as pupil of an existing master, had qualified by examination in certain subjects after a fixed course of study. When this evolution was complete the essential elements of a modern university — matriculation, terms of residence, syllabus, examination and degree, distinction of faculties and government by all graduates or by regent masters - were in existence.

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The first course, to be taken by all, was that in arts. In the distant past this had been the education of the late Roman empire in the seven liberal arts. In the monasteries and cathedral schools of the early Middle Ages the philosophical and mathematical parts of this education had been reduced to a minimum, and attention had been given almost solely to the literary discipline of grammar and rhetoric, which entailed the reading of classical authors and composition in Latin. At the scholastic revival of the early eleventh century dialectic had begun to assume supreme importance and logic was the crown of a career in the schools. By 1150 the literary arts had been relegated to the ‘grammar’ schools which were preparatory to the university course, and the ‘arts’ course, which lasted for six years, was almost entirely occupied with logic, dialectic and the techniques of disputa¬ tion, though in some schools a kind of ‘advanced level’ in grammar was part of the course. The mastership in arts could not be attained before the age of twenty, and the newly-admitted master had then to teach, in the arts school at Paris for at least two years. Then he could, if he so decided, begin his course in theology, but many masters in arts began this after several more years of teaching, for while the course in theology lasted for eight years, no one could attain the dignity of master (later doctor) of holy writ (pagina sacra) under the age of thirty-four. Of the eight years’ course five were spent as a student, three as a bachelor of theology. It was indeed a long and exacting preparation which made demands upon the moral and material resources of candidates, and it was inevitable that the wastage or ‘fall-out’ rate was very high. It was one of the principal faults of medieval university education that there was no adequate theological course available for those who looked no higher than a useful pastoral life on a parish. Another peculiarity of the developed educational system was the am¬ biguous position of philosophy proper - epistemology, metaphysics, ethics and psychology. For reasons which are beyond our present scope, Plato’s dialogues were virtually unknown in western Europe before the fifteenth century, while the works of Aristotle, beginning with a long series of logical works, became progressively familiar to the schools and universities over a long period of two centuries, 1050-1250, and, as they became available, became and remained the basic text-books of all secondary education. When the purely philosophical works were received at Paris, from about 1200 onwards, all topics in them that bordered upon theology, such as the immortality of the soul, freewill, the origins of the world, and such, were banned to the arts school. This ban soon proved impossible to maintain, for it was inevitable that arts masters should wish to read and to teach the whole Aristotelian corpus as it became available. On the other hand, both Aristotle and the Arabic commentators whose works came along with his, were unorthodox by any Christian standards on several points, such as the nature of the soul, its origin, and the determinist outlook of both Aristotle and his commentators. It was this tension that brought the great cleavage of the last decades of the thirteenth century between the masters in arts, who followed Aristotle ‘right or wrong’ when he conflicted with the truths of the faith, and the theologians. These latter were also divided among themselves between those who, with Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas,

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used Aristotle as a base of their thought and explained or eliminated his theological errors, and those who, with Bonaventure and the Franciscans in general, distrusted Aristotle and, after unsuccessful attempts to make a viable philosophy out of Augustine’s writings, turned with Duns Scotus to a new and original system. What has just been said will help to explain why the theological system of the late Middle Ages is called ‘scholastic’. It was not only created and elaborated in the schools, whereas earlier and later theology often had its origin in monastic cloisters and the studies and books of individuals such as Erasmus, Calvin, Luther and others, but it used throughout the tech¬ nique of the arts school, the technique of logic and disputation, which became and long remained the instrument of all acquisition and imparting of knowledge. 2. Philosophy and theology To the element of logic and dialectic was added, in the thirteenth century, a strictly philosophical complement when the ethics, metaphysics and psychology of Aristotle became known. The use of a complete body of philosophy was a godsend to the arts faculty, hitherto confined to the technique of thought rather than to thought itself, and to whom any theological topic was forbidden ground. The initial prohibition of Aristotle by the provincial synod of Sens in 1210, by the papal legate Robert de Courson in 1215 and by the pope in 1231 have often given rise to mis¬ understanding. These decrees applied only to Paris (Oxford was not covered) and to teachers (private reading was not forbidden) and to the arts school (not to the theologians), and was due to the known or suspected unorthodoxy of some of the Philosopher’s teaching, e.g., on the eternity of the world and the nature of the soul. It wras not in fact enforceable and was ignored twenty years after the first condemnation. Meanwhile the theo¬ logians, all past masters in dialectic, were using philosophical arguments more and more to defend and explain revealed doctrine. This leaven of philosophy that permeates the mass of doctrine is char¬ acteristic of thirteenth-century theology. In this, the age of Aquinas differs from that of Anselm and Abelard. Both those thinkers used logic and dialec¬ tic in their analysis and explanation of religious truth, and accepted from their distant predecessors, as part of tradition, certain principles or assump¬ tions derived ultimately from Plato. But neither of them had even the beginnings of a system, and the later Platonizers, such as Gilbert de la Porree, applied philosophical (or semantic) principles to this or that particular teaching. The twelfth century, in fact, was not in possession of any system inherited from the past, and made no attempt to construct one. In the thirteenth century all this was changed. By 1200 a large part of the philosophical, as distinct from the logical, thought of Aristotle had been translated from the Arabic and had reached Paris, and by 1250 the com¬ plete corpus of the only tolerably complete ancient system of philosophy was available in adequate Latin form. To almost all medieval minds it was axiomatic that the human mind could attain to truth in its contact with the world ‘outside’ itself - that it could, in other words, express the nature

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of things rationally and truthfully. Philosophy, therefore, was a natural and certain grasp of the created universe which gave a firm base for theo¬ logy, God’s revealed truth. Moreover, the strong medieval reverence for the wisdom of ancient times, the existing familiarity with the technical Aristotelian machinery of thought, and the clarity and cohesion of Aristotle’s teaching, combined to prejudice minds in its favour. So, in the first half of the thirteenth century, there was a gradual assimilation of Aristotle which became complete and programmatic with Albert the Great and his pupil Aquinas, as also, though this is outside our sphere, with the leading masters of the arts school. The supremacy of Aristotle was only gradually and never universally acknowledged. While the climate of thought at Paris and Oxford impelled all theologians to the use of philosophy as a handmaid of theology, many were apprehensive of Aristotle as a pagan whose conception of God as Creator and Provider, and of the immortal soul and its destiny, left much to be desired. The Franciscan masters in particular, who early rose to eminence at Paris and Oxford, regarded theology not so much as a science, as a way to God, a directory of the spiritual life. In this they were adapting their Franciscan ideals to the outlook of St. Augustine. Augustine, it must never be forgotten, had been for eight hundred years the doctor and theologian par excellence, accepted and imitated by all. He was not primarily a philosopher, but he owed much to Platonic thought, and throughout his life and writings he accepted what he took to be Plato’s, but which was largely in fact Plotinus’s, explanation of the universe as the true ‘One’. In particular, the ‘exemplarism’ of both Augustine and the medieval Francis¬ can school, which regarded all creation as reflecting the divine Mind and its ideas, was a Christianizing of the Platonic ‘ideas’ and of the emanation of all things from the ‘One’ in Plotinus. Similarly, the Augustinian explanation of knowledge as the ‘divine illumination of the intellect’ - an irradiation of truth in the form of ideas and moral principles from the Word of God - is a Christianized version of the Neoplatonic illumination of soul by the divine Mind. The latter teaching, in particular, so different from the prosaic, empirical, almost mechanical Aristotelian explanation, was the shibboleth of traditionalist orthodoxy. There was therefore a clash of minds between those who claimed to follow the old ways and those who regarded Aristotle as the exponent of right reason. Hitherto there had been no schools or ‘parties’ of theology; henceforth there was to be a succession of schools traditionalist ‘Augustinian’, Thomist, Scotist, Ockhamist and the rest, in agreement as to the fundamental truths of the faith, but differing widely in their explanations and in the conclusions drawn from them. On one point, however, all were for the rest of our period agreed. A theologian must have a background of philosophical thought. 3. Bonaventure and Albert the Great This is not the place for an account of the developments and varieties of presentation in the thirteenth century. Such space as is available must be given principally to Aquinas. His voluminous output, and the overall consistence of his account of Christian doctrine, to say nothing of the

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qualities that earned for him in his lifetime the title of ‘our common master’ at Paris (communis doctor), and that have put him in a place apart in modern times - all these demand that some account should be given of him. Second only to Aquinas in influence and genius, St. Bonaventure, his 'opposite number’ among the Franciscans and in some ways his opponent, must receive at least a short notice. Bonaventure (1221-74), though an exact contemporary, was even more precocious in talent than Thomas, and left the academic life for ever when called to be general of his order at the age of thirty-six. Consequently he seems to be of an older generation in his career as in his thought, though he lived to know, and to controvert, some of the later work of Aquinas, for his reputation and high office gave him an audience at Paris whenever he wished. A saint as well as a Franciscan, he regarded theology as a spiritual rather than an intellectual pursuit, a way of life rather than a science. In his most familiar and characteristic work, the Journey of the Mind to God (Itinerarium mentis ad Deum) he translates into a way of life St. Augustine’s conception of a Christian education, a progress from human knowledge by way of scriptural and theological learning to mystical knowledge and ecstatic union with God. Holding with Augustine that God and the soul are the only topics of interest to the theologian, he writes chiefly in all his works - in his commentary on the Lombard and in his discussion of Genesis — of God’s nature, of the angelic choirs, and of the creation of man, his soul and his spiritual gifts. With Augustine he holds that God is directly, though darkly and intuitionally, perceptible to the human intellect, and therefore known with innate knowledge before all else. With Augustine also (and with Plato) he regards the soul as a metaphysical substance living a life of its own here below, ‘within’ the body, not forming with it a single human nature. The senses pass on to the soul the impressions they have received from outside, but the soul judges of their nature and of truth by the divine illumination of the intellect that has already been described. Bonaventure was the first to present a comprehensive scheme of Christian doctrine resting upon an explicitly formulated outlook on the universe, on the metaphysical constitution of beings, and the process of cognition in the senses, mind and soul. All this is informed by a spirit of balanced fervour and ‘unction’ unequalled in the work of any other master save Hugh of St. Victor. This, together with his official position and the holiness of his life, make him the standard-bearer of the Franciscan theologians, and when, after his death, differences crystallized into rival systems, his work, supplemented by that of John Pecham, the friar-archbishop of Canterbury, became the basis of the ‘Augustinian’ as opposed to the ‘Aristotelian’ theologians, and the resulting amalgam was given further philosophical and theological reinforcement by Duns Scotus, to go down the centuries as the only orthodox rival to Thomism. Bonaventure used Aristotle in many places, when it seemed that his was the most helpful explanation of a particular point, but he was not fully an Aristotelian, and in fact expressed distrust of purely human wisdom. The theologian responsible for integrating Aristotle into the Christian outlook, and also for giving philosophy - and principally Aristotelian philosophy -

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an autonomous value as the basis of certain natural truth accessible to all men, was the German Dominican Albert (? 1206-80). Almost as learned, as versatile and as prolific as the Philosopher himself, he recognized that of all systems then known that of Aristotle, with its unique combination of empiricism and idealism, common sense and abstract thought, was the most viable and the most ‘rational’ to serve as a basis for theology. It was indeed for him pure natural truth, as distinct from the supernatural truth of revelation. He therefore set himself to translate and comment upon the whole Aristotelian corpus, and practically completed his task. Yet in another phase of his long career, he did much the same service for the pseudo-Denis, then still held to be St. Paul’s convert Areopagite, and therefore enjoying quasi-apostolic authority. The actual writer of the works of 'Denis’ was probably a Christian Neoplatonist of c. 500, but this was suspected by no one in the thirteenth century, and Denis held, in the realm of mystical theology and angelology, a comparable place to that of Aristotle in natural philosophy. Albert was a wide and sympathetic thinker, but not an original one, and he made no attempt to extend or correct Aristotle so as to make his system fully capable of integration into Christian thought. That task was carried through by his pupil and friend Thomas Aquinas. 4. Thomas Aquinas Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) c>wes his title of prince of the scholastics to a combination of qualities. On the level of philosophy it was he who took the decisive step of accepting in principle the need for a complete and ordered svstem of rational thought as a foundation and instrument for subsequent theological construction, and in building this edifice with Aristotle as his guide. Nevertheless, he did not only depart from the Philosopher on numerous points where Aristotle’s teaching was incompatible with Christian truth, but he altered the emphasis and shifted the centre of gravity so as to construct what was in effect a new and original system in which all created, finite being appeared as the work and reflection of a simple, uncreated, personal Being, God, and in which all lines of being and potency descended from God, while all activities of all beings serve to obey and glorify him. The centre of all thought is found in the word spoken by God to Moses: ‘I am who I am.’ He thus reverses the Aristotelian outlook. While the Philosopher gives all his attention to the universe perceptible by the senses, and finds above it only a First Cause, a Prime Mover, Aquinas regards above all the infinitely rich Being of God, Three in One, the source of all being, goodness, life, love and truth, of whom the sun, source of all material energy, is a type in the physical realm. On the level of theology he appears as a thinker who, above all others, ordered the whole complex of the Christian revelation, as his contemporaries saw it, to the smallest detail, and who brought to this task an unparalleled capacity for preserving unity in multiplicity and for infusing spiritual wisdom into every subject he touched. No great theologian has been more familiar with Scripture and tradition, yet no great theologian, save perhaps

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St. Augustine, has given more pregnant and original illustration to the truths of faith. One of his greatest achievements was the delimitation of natural and supernatural. The writers of the Old and New Testaments, and Christ himself in his utterances, had viewed human life in terms of good and evil, flesh and spirit, service of God and service of self. It was an existential outlook and as such went home to the bosoms of all men, and although Christ himself, and his apostles in their letters, had always asserted the necessity and gratuity of a new and heavenly life for those who were to be saved, they had not found occasion to make any distinction between human nature as such and sinful human nature, or between the divine help that enabled Peter to walk upon the waters and the divine life that comes, for example, at baptism. St. Augustine, who gave so much of its character to western theology, was even more fully 'existential’ in describing human life in terms of the Christian life with its mingled good and evil, self-love and God-given love, nature and grace. Though Augustine was so precise and assured as to the total inability of a human being to rise from his low estate and to perform morally good works without the assistance of grace, the human being Augustine considers is either the unbaptized creature, intrinsically sinful, or the baptized and believing Christian. Moreover, the neoplatonist philosophy, which lay behind his outlook on the world, allowed no place for any being that was not in some sense an emanation from the principle of good, and to some degree a spiritual being. In other words, neither as a Christian nor as a philosopher did Augustine draw a clear line between the creature of God in its natural condition and the creature elevated to the life of Christ in God by grace. Anselm inherited this outlook, as did the long series of Augustinian theologians from Hugh of St. Victor to Bonaventure, while Abelard, who was not an Augustinian, had a totally inadequate conception of the life of grace. It was only when Aristotle’s writings, especially the Ethics, became familiar, that the picture emerged of a man, without the Christian faith, and without the Christian sense of moral evil, with no conception of divine assistance or an eternal destiny of life or death, seeking after ethical good¬ ness with a hierarchy of natural, human virtues. This impelled Aquinas to seek for a clear distinction between human life with its natural faculties and virtues and ends, and the life of regenerate man with habitual grace and a life of God-given virtues. In lieu of Augustine’s single life of evil rescued by grace, Aquinas reckons with three lives - that of the human being as such in his ‘pure nature’; that of fallen and sinful human nature; and that of redeemed and spiritually endowed man. By so doing he can assess both the dignity and the fallibility of human nature as such, and the nobility of the Christian life which is the germ of eternal life, and a real initial participation in the divine life of Christ. The very reality and nobility of this participation implies a share in its supernatural quality which, so far from implying spectacular or miraculous experiences, implies rather an absolute transcendence of human powers of perception and feeling. Holding as he did with Aristotle and the general agreement of mankind and human practice that man’s mind, working upon sense-perceptions of

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the universe external to itself, can recognize in it order and causality, Aquinas held also that the mind could attain to a firm rational certainty of a First Cause possessing, in an eminent degree, the powers of intelligence and outgoing benevolence that are potentially present in a human being. Thus he rejected the Anselmian argument, that the intuition of being implied, in the ultimate resort, its existence in the fullest grade of perfection; Aquinas based his own argument on the realization that to accept the existence of any being that is not the cause of its own existence implies the existence of a supreme being who has no cause outside himself, but is the cause of all existing things. From this it followed that the supreme being possessed, in an eminent, inconceivable degree, all the perfections and endowments recognizable in the universe, as also supreme dominion and provident care of all. With this rational outline as a preparation, the historical fact of God’s revelation of himself and of his gifts and promises provided those who accepted it with the uncovenanted gift of the new light of faith, by which God is accepted not as the end of a process of reasoning, but from the outset as the infinitely rich Source of Being. ‘I am who I am’; loving Father; co¬ equal Son and Word; and Love personified, from whom descends all light and life to mankind. We are not here concerned with the content of the Christian revelation, but with the theological presentation characteristic to Aquinas. As regards the existence of God, he dismisses the theory of innate ideas, and also the Anselmian argument, as we have seen. His own celebrated five proofs, which derive ultimately from Greek philosophy, are various forms of the argument from causality or origin. As for the soul, we have no direct knowledge of its essence, but experience of its activity, the reflex argument, is sufficient. Its immortality is proved primarily by the Platonic argument of its simplicity as spirit, which has no parts and therefore cannot be destroyed, but Aquinas is aware of such other arguments as the natural desire for happiness and the need for some sanction for good and evil actions. As regards the Incarnation, Aquinas bases himself upon the words of the Creed (which epitomizes scriptural and apostolic teaching) that the primary cause of the appearance of a divine person in human form was to redeem man from sin and to give him eternal life by a share, through adoption, in his own true sonship of God, by means of his obedience even unto death. The ‘exemplary’ interpretation, that the Word became flesh to instruct us by teaching and example, though true, was secondary to the principal end. St. Thomas therefore held that without sin there would have been no Incarnation: in the wisdom and loving-kindness of God, Adam’s fall was a happy mishap (felix culpa). The profound and moving teaching of Scotus, that the Son took human nature because by no other means could perfect love be given to God by his creation, and that therefore the Incarnation would have taken place even had there been no sin, would have failed to satisfy Aquinas, primarily because precise revelation is our only guide to God’s purposes, but also because the opinion of Scotus would not only make the Incarnation historically irrelevant (since mankind would have been elevated to divine sonship in the divine plan irrespective of the Fall of man

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and the Resurrection of Christ) but would also deprive us of the supreme example of God's power to bring greater good out of evil. In dealing with the Trinity, Aquinas developed the teaching of the Greek fathers and Augustine and Hilary. The three divine Persons in one divine Nature are ‘subsistent relationships'; that is, the single, simple Godhead, which in all its relations with creatures acts as One, is distinct within its simplicity by the relationships of paternity and sonship and ‘spiration’ which are at once real as individual personalities within the Godhead, and yet exist to our minds only in so far as they are relationships. As regards the Fall and its consequences, Aquinas was the first to dis¬ tinguish clearly between the natural being of man, without either sin or grace, and man as we know him to have been from revelation and experience. The first man, according to Aquinas, was endowed after creation with grace, that is, with a supernatural knowledge and love of God. The Fall was possible because a finite creature, endowed with freewill, has always within himself an element of imperfection. Though never compelled to fail he is incapable by himself of always succeeding, and in the case of the first man the powerful suggestion to evil came from a spiritual agency outside himself. In Aquinas’ view original sin differs widely from personal guilt, and in fact is called sin only by analogy; thus unbaptized infants fail indeed to attain to the beatific vision, but have no personal punishment or suffering. The motions of concupiscence, the rebellious physical desires, are a part of the result of original sin, but not in themselves sinful, still less original sin itself. On this point Aquinas firmly opposed Augustine. But besides the loss of grace, or immortality, and of a title to eternal beatitude, the total aversion of Adam from God left in his progeny the egoism of pride, together with weakness of will and (to a lesser extent) darkness of mind. These can be healed only by a more than natural strength and light, that is, by divine grace. Aquinas explained the difficult matter of the transmission of original sin by emphasizing the position of the First Man as head and representative of the whole human race, as Christ was to be of redeemed and glorified humanity, and he used the analogy of the sympathy between the head and other members of the human body. The Israelites received sanctifying grace through the gift of faith in God and his revelation, and in a Messiah who was to come. Christians receive in baptism or at conversion from sin the faith and love of Christ whom they now recognize as God. This ‘sanctifying’ grace establishes in the soul the adoptive sonship of God, gives to it supernatural light and power, and enables it to merit, by free obedience, greater grace and ultimately the vision of God. But human nature, in itself, is not evil; grace ennobles nature, it does not destroy it. In his treatment of grace Aquinas followed Augustine, as modified by the decrees of the second council of Orange (529) and Roman pronouncements. Man when without grace cannot merit internal, sanctifying grace by any action, though he may be disposed to receive it by ‘external’ graces such as, e.g. the preaching of a missionary. He is free to accept or to reject grace, but in the case of acceptance the act, though free, is essentially due to the impulse of grace, whereas rejection, or non-acceptance, is due to man’s own

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deficiency. Aquinas repeats more than once the words of Isaiah (xxvi 12): ‘Thou hast wrought all our works in us’, and of Hosea (xiii 9): ‘O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself; but in me is thine help.’ As regards the mystery of salvation and election to heavenly glory, Aquinas, following St. Paul and St. Augustine, gives primary and final place to the foreknowledge of God. The elect, chosen from eternity, are saved by the omnipotent decree of God, that is, by predestination. The lost, of whose number we have no knowledge whatsoever, are foreseen from all eternity as failing through their own deficiency. Aquinas studiously avoids the ‘double predestination’ that appears in some utterances of Augustine. The reconciliation of God’s foreknowledge and decree with man’s freedom is made by the assertion that God’s infinite power can effect with infallible certainty both that an action shall take place and that it shall be a free action. God indeed wishes the salvation of all men and Christ died for all men, but man can freely refuse the gift of God, and God permits this failure which he has foreseen but has not decreed. Free-will can at any moment fail to accept, but if no obstacle is placed the first grace gives birth to the second. In other words, in the way of salvation every grace that is not freely refused is in fact efficacious. Aquinas, following St. Augustine, is insistent that grace is effective within the soul as an act of God’s controlling power. It is an instance of the general truth that all positive action is in the ultimate resort the work of God. Aquinas’s attitude to grace has therefore no similarity with later conceptions of saving grace as a superior attraction (save in a purely descriptive sense) or as solely a providential collocation of circumstances. It is the action, infallible yet sweet, of God within the soul, producing the action and by means of his omnipotence, producing it freely. St. Thomas nowhere uses the phrase ‘physical premotion’ which was later to be a Thomist shibboleth but it is, properly understood, a fair comment on his teaching. Besides the graces common to every soul predestined to receive super¬ natural enablement and light, there are certain important kinds of grace peculiar to the visible church of Christ, known as the sacraments. Aquinas and his contemporaries inherited the findings of more than a century of debate and themselves gave classic formulation to the doctrines of the sacraments. The seven - and only seven - sacraments, each with its ‘matter’ and ‘form’, of which three - baptism, confirmation and order - impress an eternal character upon the soul, were by now part of the common belief of the church. In Aquinas’s system Penance had assumed the shape which it still holds in the Roman Catholic church, consisting of a detailed confession, contrition (or sorrow) which includes a serious resolve of amendment, and satisfaction, that is, the performance of an enjoined task of prayer, penance or almsgiving. In the matter of contrition, Aquinas held that ‘imperfect’ contrition (usually known as attrition), that is, detestation of sin as incur¬ ring the divine sentence of punishment, is a sufficient disposition for absolution. In the matter of the Eucharist Aquinas added precision to the common teaching that, while the substance (a metaphysical, not a physical term) of the elements was changed, the accidents or species remained, by holding

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that the accidents perceived by the senses ‘inhered in the basic accident of quantity’. As is well known, St. Thomas gave a remarkable statement both of his beliefs and of his piety and devotion to the Real Presence in the sequence and hymns he composed for the office of the newly instituted feast of Corpus Christi. The hymn Adoro Te devote, now recognized as certainly by him, is in the same vein. The distinguishing mark of sacramental as opposed to other forms and means of grace is its connection with an external act and in some cases with an external medium, such as water or oil. The seven sacraments were considered to be means instituted by Christ himself as a permanent and essential feature of the Christian life, and part of the public and social activity of the church. For all save two of the sacraments priestly or episcopal ministration was necessary, and the remaining two (baptism and matrimony) became, the one immediately and the other belatedly, peculiarly ‘social occasions’, normally requiring the presence of a priest. In all these save matrimony the main lines of theology and discipline were settled in practice and law in the twelfth century, but were given full theological treatment by Aquinas and others. A further property of sacramental grace, suiting the visible, public nature of its occurrence, was its certainty. Whereas the bestowal of sanctifying grace in the individual case is normally not only inapprehensible but also unsusceptible of observation or record, with the sacraments the performance of the correct act with the suitable inward disposition gives certainty of the reception of sacramental grace, ex opere operato (by virtue of the act duly performed) as the later phrase went. This transaction, so often seen as something mechanical, is in the mind of Aquinas and his contemporaries governed by a spiritual condition on the part of the recipient which is necessary for its fulfilment. For the reception of four of the sacraments, called ‘sacraments of the living’ (that is, living already in grace), the soul, if it is to receive actual sacramental grace, must be right in its relationship to God. Otherwise, for so long as the hindrance to grace exists, the grace remains inoperant. For the others - baptism, penance and anointing - the recipient, if not an infant, must at least not be in a state of positive aversion from God, and normally explicit sorrow for sin is required. Moreover, the familiar axiom, that the quality of a gift is determined by the capacity of the recipient, holds good here as in other circumstances. Grace cannot be measured, but a careless, thoughtless recipient is by his own fault barring the way to the inflowing of God. By definition he is not wholly averse, but he may, by his habitual or actual love of things in this world, be refusing to accept the invitation to advance in the love of God. Not the least important part of the Thomist system is his detailed treatment of the endowment of the Christian soul for the service of God. In this he discovered four levels of virtuous and meritorious activity. Defining virtue as a habit rendering right action not only possible but in a sense ‘second nature’, he took as his basis from Greek philosophy the four ‘cardinal’ virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance as the norms of a good, rational human life. The Christian is raised to a higher level by his new knowledge and love of God, for which he is indebted to the

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‘theological’ virtues of faith, hope (or trust) and charity (love). As however the Christian is, by his reception of the gospel teaching, committed to higher standards of life than is the ‘natural’ man, he needs a special assistance of God, which he receives in a more refined form of the cardinal virtues, by which, for example, prudence is no longer merely a right judgment in human relationships and activities, but is right judgment in preferring the teaching of Christ and the service of God to all purely human convenience or custom. Above this again is the service of one made perfect in the Christian life, in which he no longer acts by reasoning or deliberation, but by inspiration and a sense of sympathy with the words and actions of Christ. For this life there are the Gifts of the Holy Spirit - wisdom, under¬ standing, knowledge, counsel, fortitude, piety and the fear of God - given to the soul in a special way at Confirmation, and enabling the strong servant of Christ to act without argument or effort as he sees his Master acting and willing him to act. This hierarchy of habits and actions, so schematic and artificial at the first glance, is in fact, like so much of scholastic thought which is based on Greek philosophy, merely a formal analysis and exposition of familiar experience. This is brought out very clearly in Aquinas’s account of the exercise of the virtuous habits. The human virtues imply simply a rational choice and a greater or lesser amount of moral effort. They do not differ in the manner of their action from a physical exercise such as throwing a ball at an object, and a ‘habit’ can be acquired by a series of acts. The theo¬ logical virtues and the ‘infused’ moral virtues need a God-given capacity and a God-given light and strength, but these helps, which are unfelt and recognized only by their effects, elicit actions which are the outcome of reasoning and effort. The Gifts of the Holy Spirit, on the other hand, in a properly disposed subject, bestow both the capacity to act and the act itself, that is, they bestow knowledge and accomplish acts in a soul capable and willing of accepting the gift of God. In other words, while in the case of the virtues, once they are infused, the divine action cooperates in and with the human agent, in the case of the Gifts, the divine action operates in and without any effort on the part of the recipient. ‘For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.’ Or, as Tennyson wrote: ‘Our wills are ours, we know not how, Our wills are ours, to make them thine.’ It is not surprising therefore that St. Thomas sees the Gifts of the Holy Spirit in action in the lives of Christians made perfect and drawn to the mystical life. In common with all major scholastic theologians, who in this do but echo the unanimous opinion of medieval Christendom, he held that the Christian life could and should be a steady and gradual progress in virtue, achieved by God’s grace in a soul that offers no hindrance and trustfully consents to the inspiration to follow all Christ’s commands and counsels, with the inevitable sacrifices and hardships they may seem to entail. He held also, again in accordance with tradition, that certain ‘states’ of life are, considered in the abstract, more ‘perfect’ than others, as implying an acceptance of ideals and aims beyond that of obeying the explicit

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commands of God and of the earthly representatives of God, the rulers of his church. Thus the dedicated state of virginity and celibacy, in both men and women, is a higher vocation in itself than marriage; that of an ordained minister of religion is higher than that of a layman, as being devoted essentially to the direct service of God; that of the vowed religious higher than that of a cleric, as being that of one solemnly pledged to obedience, chastity and the lack of ownership of material property, and pledged implicitly to aim always at the perfect service of Christ. These grades, however, though valid in the abstract when all other things are equal, are not in fact and existentially the ultimate criterion of excellence; this consists solely in the degree of the love of God manifested in thought, word and deed by the individual Christian. Thus in the concrete a married man may be far holier than a bishop, but in such a case the one is living with a more intense devotion to God than his ‘state’ demands, whereas the other is failing to live up to the obligations he has voluntarily undertaken. Aquinas, again in accordance with universal western tradition, divided the Christian life, according to its essential character in the individual, into active and contemplative, the latter being the nobler of the two. In his treatment of this point, he was not always successful in avoiding an ambiguity of long standing which had its origin in antiquity and has persisted to the present day. Greek philosophy in the age of Aristotle divided the use of human faculties into the active way, i.e., the doing or making of something by means of visible action, or implying the use of external means, and the contemplative way, i.e., the purely intra-mental activity of reflection and reasoning upon the nature and purpose of the universe of spirit and matter. The latter was pronounced to be the nobler occupation for which all others were but a preparation. This terminology was taken over by Plotinus and later thinkers in the Greek tradition, but with a strictly ethical and religious slant - the active life was the exercise of virtue in relation to persons and things, the contemplative life was the absorption of the mind in a gradual ascent from all things to the One, who was also the supreme Good. By an easy transition, St. Augustine, in this as in other matters profoundly influential, Christianized the two terms with subtle changes. The active life was the life of Christian virtue; the contem¬ plative life, found in its fulness only in the after-life of the Beatific Vision, was found also but rarely in Christian experience as a momentary enlighten¬ ment which was seen by the recipient as a glimpse of uncreated light, as of God himself. Henceforward there was ambiguity. The active life was the life of common Christianity, lay and clerical, devoted to charitable and apostolic work. The contemplative life was that of hermits and monks and nuns in general, whose principal occupation was prayer and meditation (reading and re¬ flection) on the truths of the faith. At the same time on a deeper internal plane the active life was that of good actions performed consciously and voluntarily, with the help of grace. Contemplation was the rare reception of knowledge and vision such as was known by experience to occur in persons of unusually holy life. Neither St. Thomas nor any of his con¬ temporaries fully avoided this ambiguity. With all theologians St. Thomas

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was agreed on the superiority of the contemplative life, and on the con¬ viction that contemplation was the highest spiritual experience of the soul, but it is often extremely difficult to be certain whether in a given place contemplation means for him devout meditation of a mind enlightened by grace, or the reception of inexpressible, incommunicable knowledge and love of God in a way recognized to be supernatural, i.e., beyond the natural powers. Throughout his writings, however, and again in harmony with a tradition as old as the Greek fathers, he regards the seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit as a species of supernatural agency more direct and simple than that given in the Christian life to all. This agency does not merely work in and with the human mind and will, but it moves the powers, which do no more than give their consent, to a higher form of activity than they are capable of by themselves. From this it is only a step - and that step was soon taken to equate the inward contemplative life with the mystical life and to define it as the infusion of love and knowledge by means of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, taking the form of directly ‘operant’ grace, as distinct from the active life of the virtues brought into play by ‘cooperant’ grace. In either case the grace is ‘supernatural’ and as such inapprehensible by the senses and faculties, but in the case of ‘operant’ grace of this special kind the soul (though not the senses or reason) is conscious that it is receiving a love and knowledge that it cannot express. This account of the contemplative life is not proposed explicitly by St. Thomas, but it can be found in its component factors in scattered sentences and phrases, and it has always been accepted by Thomists.

THE LATER SCHOLASTICS THE BREAKDOWN OF THE THOMIST SYNTHESIS i. The condemnations of 1270 and 1277. Duns Scotus When Bonaventure and Thomas took their doctor’s degree together in 1257 there was indeed a rivalry between the two leading orders of friars, but theologians had not yet irrevocably split into groups of warring partisans. Aquinas, indeed, then and later had aroused criticism as well as interest by his thorough-going acceptance of Aristotelian philosophy, suitably pro¬ cessed, as the steel framework of his system. In particular his adoption of Aristotelian epistemology, to the exclusion of divine illumination, and of Aristotle’s definition of the soul as the ‘form’ of the body, which seemed to some less reconcilable with Christian tradition than the Platonic view, aroused hostility among the traditionalists. But a fatal crisis and con¬ frontation might have been avoided but for the appearance in the arts school of a frankly heterodox interpretation of Aristotle, which placed in full daylight his doctrine of the eternity of the world (thus leaving no place for creation), the absence of any clear declaration of the immortality of the soul, and a rigid order in the universe which, when it touched upon the human soul, came near to moral determinism. A series of these and other propositions was condemned by Bishop Tempier of Paris in 1270. No Thomis thesis was included in the condemnation, but there was a general feeling that the escape was a narrow one. St. Thomas died in 1274, and in 1277, on the third anniversary of his death, when he was no longer there to answer, a second and more extensive batch of propositions, including several of his philosophical theses, were condemned in what was a general onslaught on Arabic-Aristotelian positions. The slur on Aquinas was removed fifty years later by Pope John XXII, but the condemnation of 1277 was, and was accepted at Paris as being, a warning against Aristotelian thought and in particular against the Philosopher’s inadequate conception of God, of the human soul and of the universe as an eternal being developing inevitably in all its parts. Henceforth, the followers of Aquinas became a school, and for long a small school, while philosophy, at least in the theological faculty, moved away from Aristotle. In the event this meant that the achievement of St. Thomas in construct¬ ing a system in which nature and grace, human knowledge and revelation, human reason and infused knowledge, interlocked to construct a Christian system of divine government, remained isolated as the teaching of a school and had no influence on the climate of the period that immediately followed.

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In Etienne Gilson’s familiar words: ‘after a brief honeymoon, theology and philosophy feel that their marriage was a mistake’. But Gilson elsewhere finely applied to Aquinas the words of the Psalmist (Ps. ci 19 vulgate): ‘These things shall be written in a generation other than our own, and a people yet to be created shall praise the Lord'. The age of the great synthesis of philosophy and theology ceased suddenly, and in the twenty years that followed masters of a lesser calibre followed Bonaventure or Thomas, or chose what appealed to them from this master or the other. Then, at the end of the century, the Franciscan school was immeasurably strengthened by John Duns the Scot (c. 12661308) born in the Border county of Roxburghshire, and teacher first at Oxford and then at Paris and Cologne. The philosophy of Scotus, the ‘subtle doctor’, is not easy to comprehend or to propound, and no attempt will be made here to perform either feat. It is however important to realize its significance, apart from any consideration of its worth. In the first place, with Plato unknown and Aristotle virtually condemned, the way of tradition could no longer be followed. Imperceptibly, a long epoch had ended. Hitherto all thinkers from Augustine onwards had regarded it as axiomatic that the great ones of the past, Plato or Aristotle, Plotinus or Avicenna, had discovered one aspect at least of the ultimate truth of things. All that remained to be done was to get at his exact meaning, to bring his teaching up to date in a Christian context. It could then be taught like Euclid. That attitude had been driven off the field, at least for the time, by the scandals that Aristotelian learning had caused. Secondly, with Scotus there had appeared a master who was prepared to re-think large tracts of abstract philosophy with new concepts and new terms. In this he was the first of the moderns, to be followed by numerous imitators. Theologically he is of importance also in two respects. First (to develop Gilson’s metaphor) he began the formal divorce proceedings between faith and reason, natural philosophy and supernatural revelation. He accepted indeed the Aristotelian account of knowledge, as the mind working upon the data provided by the senses, while at the same time he emphasized, in this opposing Augustine, the infinity and unattainability of God by the human mind. He would not admit either the Anselmian proof, nor the Bonaventuran innate intuition, nor the Thomist argument from causality. No proof could run from creator to creature, from finite to infinite. Duns’s own proof for the existence of God was a stronger version of that of Anselm, and postulated God's infinity, and of an infinite being the mind can form no concept. Secondly, Duns, a Franciscan with something of the spirit of St. Francis and the Augustinian theologians, reacted against the alleged deter¬ minism of Aristotle and emphasized the primacy of the will. Whereas for Aquinas the will is a blind faculty, determined in general by the good but dependent upon the mind for its direction in each particular choice, for Scotus love is the ultimate source of God’s action, and the ultimate law for man. Love is the only command. Acts are good simply because they are commanded by God, the supreme Love, not because they are good in themselves. Absolutely speaking God is free; the will of God and not his mind or law has the last word. This way of thinking led to the well-known

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difference between Thomist and Scotist as to the necessity of the Incarnation. Duns was not a sceptic, but he refused to accept either the Aristotelian conception of nature, which implied the Thomist nature-grace opposition and subordination, or the Augustinian fusion of the spheres of nature and grace. This, added to his acceptance of a conceptual (that is, an intellectual) grasp of the individual prior to the abstraction of the essence of a being, marked the parting of the ways with Aquinas. Nevertheless Duns was a true theologian, with a spiritual outlook. He died young, and while many of his opinions are clear, it is not always known what were his arguments for holding them. His system as he left it was not complete, but it was extended by his successors and became for some two centuries after his death, more widely held than that of St. Thomas. They differed on many points of importance. One such, the ultimate cause of the Incarnation, has been mentioned. Another was the nature of grace, which Duns held to be directly, in its form of Charity (or Love), the ‘pouring forth of the Holy Spirit’ himself in the soul. Yet another difference, as we have seen, con¬ cerned the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin. It was natural that the Franciscans should use to the full the only mind and the only coherent system that could stand up against the Thomist synthesis. Duns’s genius lay in criticism, St. Thomas’s in constructive power, but the credal differences between the two were less important than their twofold witness to the traditional body of teaching which they had inherited. 2. The Rhineland Neoplatonists While the strict Thomist teaching was suffering something of an eclipse at Paris and Oxford, a new school of Dominican theology was coming into being in the Rhineland. Cologne, though not the seat of a university for almost a century after the death of Aquinas, had been from early times one of the international centres (studia generalia) of the Dominicans, and equally the seat of a great Franciscan school. Albert, Thomas and Duns had all taught here. When Albert was regent and later prior provincial he had given a great deal of attention to the study of the writings of the pseudoAreopagite, as we have seen, and a succession of pupils culminating in the great Master Eckhart created a school of eminence and influence. Eckhart (1260-1327), in modern times, was for long regarded as primarily a mystical writer, in whom some found the first dawn of the movement that ultimately issued in Lutheran teaching. More recently, it has been shown that in all his writings Eckhart has a firm basis of Thomist technique and theology, though he certainly used this as a vehicle for a description of the universe and of human life in Neoplatonic terms, with the ecstatic union as the crown of the spiritual life and the mystical life as the goal of Christian endeavour. Eckhart, fundamentally orthodox and willing to submit to the teaching of the church if shown to be deviating from it, was condemned after his death for propositions that were at least verbally unorthodox and pantheistic, and scholars are still in disagreement as to whether he was a mystic speaking in Neoplatonic form, or a Dionysian theologian putting his teaching into mystical phraseology. Whatever the

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truth may be, Eckhart had a very great influence. His disciples John Tauler and Henry Suso ‘screened’ his system, eliminating unorthodox and Dionysian elements while retaining his mystical bent. Both Tauler and Suso were mystical writers rather than theologians, and in the realms of pure theology the Rhineland school had little importance, but the com¬ bination of Thomist principles with mystical teaching, which was followed in practice by numerous saintly disciples, of whom Ruysbroeck was the most celebrated, was of supreme importance in mystical theology. On the one hand it extended the traditional teaching, found in Aquinas but not applied by him to the experience of the spiritual life, while on the other hand it strengthened and gave technical and adequate theological explana¬ tion to the experiences and writings of the mystics themselves. By routes hitherto unmapped, it spread to England and was reproduced by the group known as the English mystics, and later still the writings of Tauler and others penetrated to Spain where they were absorbed by the early Spanish mystical writers of the sixteenth century and served as an auxiliary to the teaching of St John of the Cross and others, and thus became a principal current in the main stream of Roman Catholic mystical theology. 3. William of Ockham (c. 1285-1347) Meanwhile at Paris and Oxford theology became steadily more eclectic and monographic, with an interest in the individual both as an object of cognition and as a preoccupation in the choice of topics for consideration. Predestination, after an interval of many centuries, became once more a burning object of controversy, with a cognate interest in freewill, the divine prescience of free acts in the future, and the fate of the unbaptized infant and the ‘good pagan’ outside the church. Then, shortly before 1320, another thinker of genius appeared at Oxford, the Franciscan friar William of Ockham. Unlike Duns, with whose thought he had throughout his work something of a love-hate relationship, Ockham was first and foremost a logician, claiming to stand to Aristotle in that domain as Aquinas had stood in the higher levels of speculative philosophy, a devoted but not blind admirer and amplifier. His system was a blend of Aristotle with the complicated new logic of the Oxford school, and it became a formidable weapon when he proceeded to expound his new epistemology and became the founder of the new Nominalism. [See note at the end of the chaptevf This, in its explanation of the process of acquiring knowledge, abandoned the way of intellectual abstraction and of any mental form or idea of universal or generic application. He eliminated also the Scotist doctrine of an intellectual apprehension, by way of intuition, of the individual. Extending Scotus, and applying the principle that runs through all his thought and was afterwards known as ‘Ockham’s razor’, that all unneces¬ sary notional entities should be suppressed, he held that the individual, the singular entity, is alone knowable, but this knowledge is wholly intuitional, not expressible in a concept, as Duns had thought. The mind does not abstract an essence from things, as Aristotle and St. Thomas had held, because there is no evidence either of the mental process of abstraction, or of the existence of an essence to be abstracted. Words such

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as ‘man’, ‘rose’ and the rest, are not universal terms about which we can philosophize; they are merely signs which we attach to the mental image and memory of our intuition of an individual, and have no more meta¬ physical connection with the objects to which they are applied than has a natural exclamation of pleasure or pain. They are purely a mental reaction. Metaphysical philosophy therefore is not a process of real knowledge and understanding, but a shifting about in our mind of mental symbols, as it were a shifting of ciphers or tickets. So far the system of Ockham might seem merely a matter of technique. When he proceeded further, however, the consequences became apparent. None of the so-called truths of natural religion can be proved - neither the existence of God nor his attributes nor the existence and immortality of the soul. All these and much else are held, and must be held, by faith alone. Hence, knowing nothing of God by our natural powers, but believing in his transcendence and omnipotence by faith, we cannot predict or define his action or lay down any limits either to his powers or to his ways of acting. Ethics depend upon- revelation; God might have made a different or even a contradictory list of command¬ ments. God is absolutely free to reward whom he will without precedent merit. No preparation or disposition is needed for any grace or for final salvation. Grace as a quality or force, and all the traditional virtues, are superfluous. Charity, as Scotus said, is the Holy Spirit, God’s Gift. Nothing else is required. All else can be cut out. We know from Scripture how we may expect God to act, and may frame our lives accordingly; but it is merely a revealed probability. Ockham was not a philosophical sceptic; he held that the universe existed and that the human mind had intuitional knowledge of its detailed parts; but this was the only knowledge available or possible. The cause-and-effect sequence was an illusion; we know the sequence in time between one event or appearance and another, and we know no more. If Aristotelian philosophy has been flippantly described as the exposition in philosophical terms of what we all hold, or ‘dazzling glimpses of the obvious’, the thought of Ockham might be characterized as the exposition in set terms of the mental outlook of an uneducated man before he has begun to put his thought into words. Ockham was delated by an Oxford master to the Curia at Avignon, whither he went to defend himself, but before the long-delayed and mild censure was pronounced he had disappeared to join the schismatic Francis¬ cans and the Emperor in their opposition to Pope John XXII. He had not yet proceeded master in theology at Oxford, and his remaining years were spent in propounding revolutionary theses concerning the papacy and the church. He died c. 1349 unreconciled to the papacy. He was never a regent master in the schools, but his logical and dialectical work remained, and it spread like oil over Europe. It was the instrument that gave what was, for the time being, the final blow to the traditional synthesis of philosophy and theology. Philosophy was reduced to logic, broadly understood, and theology to a study of the Bible and the preaching of revealed truth. Ockhamism or Nominalism spread widely and rapidly and for more than a century was to influence all thought to a greater or less degree. Only one powerful voice was raised against William of Ockham in his lifetime, that

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of his fellow Oxonian Thomas Bradwardine (c. 1290-1349), later for a few months archbishop of Canterbury. Bradwardine was chiefly concerned with Ockham’s exaltation of the divine and human freewill, which was one of the legacies from Scotus that he had exploited, and with his reduction of grace to no more than an arbitrary relationship of a man to God. If grace did not exist as a force or entity, man’s ‘good’ acts were his own work. Therefore Ockham could be labelled with the name of the only heresy that was familiar to all western medieval writers, that of Pelagius. Bradwardine therefore entitled his work The Cause of God against the Pelagians. Ockham, an object of distrust among Catholic theologians since the Council of Trent, has found powerful apologists in recent years among both his fellow-Franciscans and those brought up in a philosophical climate not unlike his own. Undoubtedly much criticism in the past has been illinformed and parrot-talk, and the thought of the fourteenth century has rightly received some of the attention that it deserved. Reaction, however, may go too far. It is reasonably urged in defence of Ockham that he was a logician, and not a theologian, and that there was little or nothing in his writings in early life (which alone are the issue here), or in those of his principal followers, contrary to Catholic belief as formally defined by creeds and councils before or during his lifetime. The first statement is formally correct. Ockham never touched theology as such. But to hold his position and follow his method was in fact tantamount to abandoning all use of the reason in explaining or defending revealed truth. No doubt in every age many are prepared to accept a body of religious teaching without any desire to criticize or analyse its meaning and credentials, and in the fourteenth century such a position was perhaps almost universal, but this would be an impossible position ip a sophisticated and largely unbelieving world. The second statement is also formally correct, save perhaps in the single but important matter of grace, where Bradwardine was justified in the title of his work. But the Christian faith, the gospel message, had not yet been solemnly defined in all its amplitude, and there were many beliefs, held by all true Christians, and inmost convictions, which were jettisoned by Ockham’s logic, such as, e.g., the direct enlightenment and strengthening of the reason and will by God, and the ability of the created mind to rise from a consideration of the creatures to a natural conviction of the existence and goodness of a creator. These, if not defined in Ockham’s day, could scarcely be denied without a real mutilation of the Christian faith. 4. Scholasticism in retrospect We have now reached what is generally agreed to have been the end of an epoch in thought and theology. During the preceding two centuries, and particularly between 1200 and 1300, the body of Christian theology, in the shape in which it was available to the schools of the west, had been ordered, analysed, explained and extended, and supported by traditional philosophy, more fully than ever before. The legacy of the western masters Anselm, Bernard, Bonaventure, Thomas - has been carried, over almost entirely into its currect teaching by the Roman Catholic church, and has deeply influenced in various ways all subsequent Christian theology, even

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that which has been ready to reject many of its most characteristic parts. No serious and well-informed theologian would today deny this achievement. Yet at the same time the constructive force in theology had ceased by the end of the fourteenth century, and an era of criticism and, in a sense, of destruction had followed, which was to continue until an altogether new situation of revolution and controversy supervened. Why did scholasticism cease to be a pregnant and constructive force? Setting aside all deeper spiritual reasons which are unseen, and also the historically ceaseless ebb and flow, action and reaction, of human thought in all mental activities, we may perhaps point to two major causes. The first is, that for three centuries before 1350, the basic instrument and pursuit of secondary and advanced education and scholarship was logic, and this secured the prizes of the academic and ecclesiastical world, and turned all its endeavours towards the critical, formal exercises of a tech¬ nique, the technique of disputation, rather than towards the exposition of many-sided reality or the intuitional deepening of spiritual knowledge. The second is that the essential aim of the Aristotelian logic and episte¬ mology is the attainment of abstract truth. To Aquinas, as to Aristotle, the abstract truth, the essential definition, the general proposition, are more valuable, more real, higher in degree than the knowledge and experience and intuition of the individual mind and its individual object. Methodically, as was later proved by its enemies, this starved all hope of progress in scientific knowledge of material things. It has also the grave defect that when syllogism led to syllogism, the slightest verbal or technical falsity if overlooked could vitiate what appeared to be a faultless chain of argument. It has always been a fault in neo-scholastic thinkers that they regard the tenth syllogism in a series of deductions from an admitted principle to have the same weight as the first. Both these characteristics tended to lead both philosophers and theologians further and further away from life and practical reality into a world of ideas and conclusions. Medieval thought and medieval theology also ran ultimately into the doldrums because they lost touch the one with the world of things and men, the other with the living Christ of the gospel, present still in his body, the church, in its saints, its teachers and its daily life. Note to p. 283: ‘the founder of the new Nominalism . Since Dom David Knowles wrote his script, a clear distinction has been drawn between William of Ockham’s own teaching and Ockhamism or Nominalism which followed but distorted his teaching. What Ockham himself did was to turn away from the exploration of what was metaphysically possible, and confine knowledge to what could be known naturally from experience, or inferred from what was believed. Evidence and meaning for universals must be derived from the knowledge of individuals. He stressed the contingency of all creation in the light of God’s omnipotence; though in that context he accepted the regularity of nature and the constancy of moral terms. He himself held to a balance between nature and supernature which his successors did not. Ed.

Christian Doctrine from 1350 to the Eve of the Reformation E. Gordon Rupp

'

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Christian Doctrine from 1350 to the Eve of the Reformation E. Gordon Rupp

The century and a half preceding the Reformation baffles the historian of doctrine. There is still a dearth of monographs, so that comparative studies abound in contradictory judgments. The view of the period as one of disintegration and decline has been modified, if not shattered by modern scholars. Yet it is true that the days of the great syntheses, of Thomas and Bonaventura, of Scotus and Ockham are over, and a late fourteenth-century ‘Summa’ is more like a modern ‘Collected Papers’ than an attempt to hold together the body of revealed and natural theology. The word ‘eclectic’ which crops up in many descriptions of the first half of the period, like Josef Lortz’s ‘Unklarheit’ of the second, are words of warning rather than description, but they point to the danger of rigid labels, since Nominalists and Realists are alike affected by cross-currents, by Augustinian or Dionysian revivals. And in the fifteenth century we have to take account of a return to orthodoxy, as in the neo-Thomism of Totting of Oyta or above all Johannes Capreolus. When we turn to England, Dr. Leff’s words are apt: ‘the intellectual life of the period is everywhere largely veiled in mists: but in England the obscurity is near to fog.’ This applies in a special degree to Wyclif studies, and he still awaits a competent theological re-assessment in the light of modern scholastic studies which tend either to ignore him or walk round him as a kind of ‘rogue elephant’. JOHN WYCLIF (c. 1330-84) was very Oxford of very Oxford. He raised the prestige of its great school of theology to new heights before plunging it to disaster. He emerged from that Merton-Balliol axis with its proud pedigree of intellectual enterprise. He stood in the dominant AugustinianPlatonic tradition of Grosseteste, Fitz Ralph and Bradwardine (itself a warning against the too facile judgment that Wyclif has no mystical element in his thought). It was also a tradition with close affinities with mathematics and with science, and in this too, Wyclif ardently shared.(The notion that it is Nominalism which nurtured modern science ignores not only the medieval Oxford tradition but the Platonists of Florence and Cambridge in later days.) His training in the years before he took his D.D. (1372) showed a formidable concentration on logic, philosophy and Biblical study. It is a pity that we know little of the corrosive and sceptical Nominalism in Oxford against which Wyclif vehemently reacted, and for which he found the antidote in a thoroughgoing realism which made

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coherent for him his view of the universe, of the nature of man, of the relation of time and eternity, and of the nature and authority of Holy Scripture. If it involved him in trouble in the realm of sacramental theology, it smoothed for him (as for Calvin later) his rationale of Predestination. But if his theology was affected, it was not controlled by his metaphysics; neither logic, philosophy nor political involvements account for his theology. Like Gerson, with whom he has more affinities than usually credited, he deemed it was a glorious thing to be a theologian, for though he believed that in some sense, all Christians have a theological vocation, he believed also in the special authority of the trained scholastic ('pure theologis oportet credere ad interpretandum scripturas secundum vivaces rationes et testimonia sanctorum, quia illi erunt boni judices in propria facultate’ - ‘One must trust implicitly in the theologians if one is to interpret the Scriptures in a living and meaningful way and in accordance with the testimony of the saints; for the theologians will prove to be good judges in their own sphere.' De officio Regis, 70.1.15). His tedious argumentation is in the manner of the age - the spiral repetitions, the wrestling with a point like a dog with a bone; but there is a sturdy rationality and a logical concentration which set him and his contemporaries many points above the sixteenth-century humanists and reformers. He was deeply imbedded in tradition, and we must not let his emphasis on the authority of Holy Scripture blind us to the extent to which his most daring arguments are clinched with an appeal to the words of Chrysostom, Grosseteste or Bradwardine. Needless to say, for him Augustine is the great master, but in his discussions of the great Christological and Trinitarian themes it is to Anselm and Aquinas that he turns. And for all his Platonism, he quotes Aristotle as often as does a Gerson or a Biel. The mass of his writings would have brought no more than local notoriety had he not attacked first the religious and then the mendicant orders, and many of the charges of error and heresy would not have been brought apart from this enmity, as they are certainly not sustained by the generally inferior arguments of Cunningham in his life-time, or the wild charges which Netter of Walden felt free to make long after his death. His treatise on the Trinity is learned but unremarkable. His tract on the Incarnation stresses the humanity of Christ, though apart from its beautiful exordium it does not perhaps quite merit Bernard Manning’s eulogy of it (Camb. Med. Hist. VII (1932), pp. 486ft.). More impressive is his De divinis mandatis, an ex¬ position of the Commandments. While drawing heavily upon moral theologians of the preceding century it centres God’s laws in the commands of Christ and in the commands of love, set within a 'theologia viatoris' (‘pilgrim-theology’) and a doctrine of the beatific vision which is in the finest tradition of Augustine and Bernard. His knowledge of Canon law and his astonishing use of history has surprised some commentators, but it is something he shared with an age which had to tackle problems of Papal and conciliar authority, and with those who were involved in the latest round of the long struggle in England between the crown and the claims of the spiritual power. None of Wyclif’s themes was invented by him. The abuses of the Church, which for him centred in its involvement with wealth, with power and with violence.

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had been the subject of protest by saints, moralists and satirists for centuries. The drastic remedy of disendowment had behind it a century and a half of debate about the question of apostolic poverty, the more im¬ mediately controversial views of Fitz Ralph about ‘dominion’ and an appeal to the temporal power to redress the balance of a greedy clericalism. When in his theoretical arguments on behalf of the Crown, Wyclif appeals to English history, he is in an important pedigree going back through the ‘Anonymous’ of York to the Anglo-Saxon church, as it looks forward to Matthew Parker and Lord Burghley. That in mid-life, like Walter Birley before him and Jean Gerson after him, he should become involved in power politics and the affairs of Princes, by no means contradicts his fierce antagonism to ‘Caesarean clergy’ who neglect their spiritual vocation to do work better done by laymen, for it was as a ‘peritus’, a professional theologian, that he acted as King’s Servant, went on an embassy and prepared long memoranda. Nothing shows this more clearly than the fact that at the end of his vast disquisitions on ‘Divine and Civil Dominion’ he rests his theological case, and pleads that it is entirely for the temporal power to decide when, how and where these arguments should be practically applied. It was from Wyclif’s discussion of practical applications of ‘dominion’ (.De Civili Dominio, Bk. I, cap. xxxv) that the propositions condemned at Rome were taken. But he grounded his main argument in Augustine and Fitz Ralph. Dominion is the direct relationship of God with all men, and therefore rooted in grace. Where grace is vitiated by sin, true dominion ceases to exist. But the abstract discussion of the state of man in the time of his innocency does not deny him the use of possessions in this fallen world. And Wyclif does not desert Augustine for the Donatists, as do others of his contemporaries, and hold that continuance in mortal sin might lead to the deprivation of clergy of their spiritual and temporal possessions. Though in an ancient usage he speaks of the Gospel as ‘Christ’s law’, and though in his teaching, which has room for merit, there is no premonition of ‘sola fide’, he is not a legalist (the same cannot be said of later Lollardy). For him all God’s demands are summed up in the deeds and speech (virtute sermonis - the 'power of the Word’) of God’s Son, and in the commands of love of God and neighbour. Here are the norms of God’s commandments which are neither many nor grievous, but which have been multiplied and complicated by the commands of men (this is the gravamen of his attacks on Roman civil law and Canon law). The background of all this is Wyclif’s view of Holy Scripture which is Christologically orientated. It is sad that reputable scholars (Smalley, Left) can use the grossly anachronistic word ‘fundamentalist’ to describe Wyclif’s view of the plenary inspiration of Scripture. For his doctrine of the relation between God, time and eternity is not an eccentric deviation based on Augustinian and neo-Platonic conceptions, but the view that God, to whom past, present and future are one, can fill each moment and each word with power (virtute sermonis). Like St. Thomas he searches under the merely literal (cf. his frequent disparagement of what is written on the skins of animals or in parchments) or the allegorically mystical, for the authentic

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meaning. There is here a doctrine of hermeneutic which should be of interest to students of Bultmann, Barth and Ebeling. Scripture is for him the supreme norm, and this is more and more emphatically stated in his later works. But I believe that Pere de Vooght is correct as against Fr. Hurley and that Wyclif by no means discards the authority of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. Like John Wesley he had become homo unius lihri (a man of one book), but like him he draws on all learning and sound tradition for the elucidation of Scripture. The year 1378 is the watershed of Wyclif’s career. Then it became plain that John of Gaunt and his party had no hope of carrying through a drastic disendowment of the English Church. It was also the year of the Great Schism, which confirmed Wyclif’s worst forebodings. He abandoned an earlier acceptance of the papal primacy in face of this dire proof that the Church had so far fallen from its primitive simplicity that its Head had become the emblem of Anti-Christ. There followed his retirement to Lutterworth and a stream of bitter polemic. He had now only one weapon left, his words: and these he used with a poignant and perhaps pathological vehemence which made him the Milton of the fourteenth century, the Kierkegaard of the later Middle Ages. He now attacked the doctrine of transubstantiation, about which he had long had philosophical difficulties, and put forward his own not more clear doctrine of the ‘remanence’ of bread and wine, and of a sacramental presence. The attack may be the measure of his political disillusion, for his royal patrons would not dare associate themselves with heresy of this order, even if they understood it. But if his doctrine expresses his honest conviction, it is also likely that, with the later Lollards, he saw in the power of the priest to make and offer Christ, the fateful mystique which overawed the laity. We must not exaggerate: Wyclif would not have used the opprobrious epithets beloved of the later Lollards. He was devoted to the eucharist, and his last seizure fell on him at Mass. His diatribes were related also to his doctrine of the Church. Like Gerson, but unlike Sir Thomas More, he knew that any definition of its nature must be complex and many-sided, but with Augustine he turned for its primary meaning to those called and chosen in Christ to be saved, the universitas praedestinorum (totality of the predestined). For the repro¬ bate he used the guarded phrase of Bradwardine - the praesciti or ‘fore¬ known’ (which seems to leave open the question of salvation ante merita praevisa or ‘foreseen merits’) and like Augustine his view of Church history is dualistic. There has been conflict and tension in the story of the People of God from the time of Cain and Abel. This is the serious point of what otherwise would seem mere abuse - his description of the lavish buildings of the mendicants as ‘Cairn’s Castles’ (Cairn is not only an anagram of the four mendicant orders but a medieval variant on Cain e.g. in the mosaics at Monreale). That is, they belong to the false church, to the accursed succession from the violent one, the usurper, the one whose vain worship is to be rejected. We can understand how in his lectures and disputations he could tickle the groundlings and infuriate the learned, for he has an almost casual way of

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turning from abstruse dialectic to withering denunciation, not erroneous or heretical, but certainly offensive to pious ears, at a time when the rule of faith was becoming more and more rigidly conceived. In one sense his programme was more revolutionary (dare one say than modern so-called ‘Christian Marxists’ or the ‘Liberation’ theologians?) than that of the Reformation. He seems to have believed that really drastic economic action carried through by political power, by disendowing the Church, might deflate its swollen structure and turn it back to better ways, to its original character as a congregation of the faithful who by goodness and love might win the loyalty of men. It has often been pointed out how much of Wyclif’s programme was carried out by the English crown, one hundred and fifty years later. The secular arm did indeed reject papal authority and all its complex implica¬ tions (though it is interesting to find Cranmer, Ridley and Matthew Parker defending the ‘patrimony of Christ’ against the laity). And article 28 of the 39 articles put Wyclif’s point exactly when it declared that ‘transubstantiation cannot be proved by holy scripture, but is repugnant to the plain words of scripture, overthroweth the nature of a sacrament and hath given occasion to many superstitions’. The cause of Wyclif in Oxford was ruthlessly repressed: his writings were proscribed, and, in England, almost totally destroyed. In an age when Oxford dons had not taken to the idea of martyrdom (would the Methodist Holy Club or the Newmannites have done more?) for the opinions of their leaders, his disciples foresook him and fled to preferments. Only a simplistic version — often a caricature of his teaching, survived amid the many spuria and dubia of his so-called ‘English works’. However attenuated may be his responsibility for the Wyclif Bible and for the Lollard preachers, it was from his circle and from no other that they came. The modern historical study of Wyclif has problems still to solve. The serious re-assessment of his theology can hardly be said to have begun. Yet it was not in England that this very English theologian found what Kierkegaard would have called ‘his lovers’ but in the middle of Europe, in Bohemia, where the accident of a royal wedding opened an ideas-route, where his views came at a timely and critical moment in Bohemian history, and were not so much a blood-transfusion as an organic transplant. The causes of this deep impact are complex and have been bedevilled by national and cultural controversy and by Marxist views. Certainly there had been in Bohemia a long-continuing attack on the abuses of the Church and on the wealth and privilege of the clergy. The young Czech theologians were in revolt against those Nominalist traditions so powerful in Paris and in Germany, and they found in Wyclif’s philosophic realism a congenial and exciting weapon. One consequence of the dispersal of the so-called ‘German Nation’ from the Charles University of Prague was to spread angry antiWyclifhte phobia among German Universities, an element of fateful influence at the Council of Constance. JOHN HUS (1369-1415) was as thorough a Czech as Wyclif an Englishman. Not in the same class as Wyclif as a philosopher and theologian, he was

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none the less learned, and with the status of a Sententiarius came to a position of eminence. When first the philosophical writings of Wyclif and then (at the turn of the century) his theological treatises reached Prague, Hus was but one of a number of scholars who became devoted expositors of Wycliffian realism - though there were others, like Stanislav and PalSc, who outwent him in uncritical acceptance of the master’s ideas, and who later were to become dangerous foes. Hus was a great preacher, of passion and burning sincerity, and found in the Bethlehem chapel an apt vehicle for the propagation of his concern for preaching and pastoral care, and a deadly invective against the sins of the clergy. For him many of these abuses centred in simony, about which he wrote his most devastating treatise. In an age of manuscripts there were problems of communicating programmes which only printing would solve, but one by-product was the not always happy custom of scholars of incorporating innumerable passages from their own (Gerson and Wyclif both were prone to this) and other people’s writings. Though there are difficulties about any statistical assessment of the amount of Wyclif which Hus incorporated into his own work (one has always to allow for a great amount in both writers directed to English or Bohemian conditions), the proportion of Wyclif in Hus is high. But he is never naive or uncritical; and with a discretion sometimes under-rated, Hus again and again drew back from apparent consequences of Wyclifhte ideas, though always - and this it was that got him into endless trouble he put the best interpretation on Wyclif's ideas and defended him against misunderstanding. Hus’s De Ecclesia is an illustration of this. Heavily indebted to Wyclif in its first part, preoccupied with his own defence in the second, he produced his own version of their common Augustinian tradition. For him too the Church' is primarily the universitas Praedestinatorum and the unsaved the Praesciti, while for him too the false church is described in apocalyptic terms as Anti-Christ. But as with Wyclif, his overall picture of the lamentable state of the church, and the revolutionary corollaries of his attack, dangerously affronted such by no means uncritical statesmen as D’Ailly and Gerson. Into the tragic ending of the Hus story we may not enter. It was perhaps naive of Hus to think that he would be allowed to address the Council of Constance on equal terms with his opponents, even if he was ignorant of the extent to which the verdict against him was predetermined before his arrival. Nor did he perhaps realize how alarmingly rigid were the inquisitorial procedures for dealing with one vehemently suspect. Certainly Hus, im¬ prisoned despite his safe-conduct, and a sick man, found himself confronting a raging and hostile assembly in one of the most shameful moments in the history of religion. But with honest obstinacy he refused to avow ideas which he had never held, in particular the ‘remanence’ eucharistic teaching of Wyclif (see p. 292), while he insisted on putting the best interpretation on words of Wyclif which authority had already condemned. Far more than any verbal transfusions from Wyclif’s works, his relation to the dead Englishman is poignantly shown in his defence of the integrity of Wyclif. Whether any recantation could have saved him must be doubted, but if he

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had thrown Wyclif overboard the task of the authorities would have been made more difficult. But the death of Hus and of his ebullient colleague Jerome of Prague was not the end, but the beginning. A movement a hundred times more powerful than Lollardy emerged, involving all classes of the Bohemian people, rooted in deep anti-clerical, anti-Papal and anti¬ imperial sentiments which turned the Hussite movements into the most formidable schism and the most deeply-biting challenge to the authority of the Western church in the centuries before the Reformation. Two leading figures in the University of Paris dominated the thought of the Council. Peter D’Ailly (1350-1420) was a follower of Ockham in philo¬ sophic matters, and much of his energies went into the immensely intricate problems of conciliar reform; but he had great width of intellectual interests and made notable studies in astrology, geography and other sciences, which were treated with reserve and suspicion by his gifted friend, disciple and successor, the great Jean Gerson. JOHN GERSON (1363-1429) - ‘Doctor Christianissimus’ (but he took a leading part in the impeachment of Hus) was the son of a farmer and sufficiently low-born to have something of a complex about aristocracy. He became Chancellor of the University of Paris, himself a great Doctor in Theology, and he rated highly his office as a theologian and his University’s role in France (‘Filia Regis’ - ‘daughter of the King’). He held some Nominalist doctrines - the concern for the untrammeled liberty of God ‘God does not will certain actions because they are good, but they are good because he wills them’ — and therefore he attacked realists who thought of the moral law as autonomous. He delivered smashing blows at the sectarian¬ ism of the schools, the bitterly warring factions, the preoccupation with hair-splitting speculation in an age of moral and spiritual disorder. His famous lectures against ‘curiositas’ and ‘singularitas’ took as their text the moralistic themes of repentance and conversion. He specially attacked the ‘formalizantes’ among the Scotists. Yet he himself was more and more drawn to spiritual theology, to the tradition of the Victorines, of Albert the Great and above all, Bonaventura, and came more and more to insist on the importance of the life of contemplation. Though he opposed the realist Platonists, he became more and more devoted to the teaching of Dionysius the Areopagite (who after all was St. Denis of France!). In his stress on the need for practical reform, his distrust of abstract speculation, he turned more and more to the thought of pastoral renewal and the need for the education of youth, and above all the reform of preaching. By the time of the Council of Constance he had won eminence as a statesman, as servant of the King and of the Duke of Burgundy and as the preacher of many notable set-piece orations before court and university. He accepted the Papal primacy but upheld the doctrine of the supremacy of a General Council, and had reservations about the practicability of reform of the Church from the top downwards, looking for renewal rather in the dioceses and parishes. His obsessive antagonism to the doctrine of violence and assassination put forward by John Petit led to a calamitous breach with his patron, the

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Duke of Burgundy, which barred his return to Paris after the council, and in Austria and in Lyons he devoted the rest of his life to a career of preach¬ ing, teaching and pastoral care and a great literary activity which included scores of works of moral theology and edification deeply influential on succeeding generations, not least on the young Luther. Like the authors of the ‘Modern Devotion’, he helped set the note of pietism in the coming age when inward religion and the care of conscience would be major theological concerns. His was the aristocracy of the self-made man: if he taunted theologians he could be brutal about the untutored laity, and he believed that the use of the Scriptures should almost entirely be confined to the clergy. But equally firmly he rejected the view that only the institutionally ‘religious’ could find evangelical perfection. His famous tract addressed to his five sisters (‘The Mountain of Contemplation’) attempted to dissuade them from the miserable estate of matrimony, but set before them a life of contemplation and action leading to ever higher states of faith, hope and love. Further at this time, as Pere Combes has shown, he did not go, but in his later writings he turned more and more to the theme of union with God. His controversy with the Flemish mystic Ruysbroeck may have rested on misunderstanding, for it seems that Ruysbroeck did not pantheistically blur the line between creator and creature. His loyalty to Bonaventura and Dionysius prevented him from divorcing mystical from speculative theo¬ logy, and in fact his views of salvation, of the sacraments and of the church seem to be held within a hierarchical and Dionysian view of the chain of being. With true insight he saw that reform must begin with a new and unspoiled generation and therefore with education, and he himself con¬ ducted experiments of which he wrote an interesting rationale. But it was his concern with conscience which marked him as a precursor of later attitudes, and it is no accident that he is almost the only fifteenth-century theologian still quoted by the English Puritans. His little tracts on Nocturnal Pollutions and on Pusillanimity were best-sellers. The period has been called by one historian ‘the century of Gerson’, and he influenced not only Catholics but Protestants in the age to come. There are interesting resemblances between his preaching and that of the next great French preacher, John Calvin. The emphasis on edification, on moral renewal, on Christianity as a way of life and a vision of God, as indeed the life of God in the soul of man, a life of renunciation and of the search for perfection, not out of but in the world - this mood was reflected and in part stimulated by the movement in Holland which has become known as ‘the Modern Devotion’. The origin and import of the term is not clear. Certainly there was little up-to-date or innovating about the mind and temper of its founder. GERHARD GROOTE (1340-84) who was a man of learning and indeed more than a bit of a bookworm, was by training more of a lawyer than a divine, and a man with not very wide horizons, as his curious letter dis¬ couraging a young man from going as missionary to Islam reveals. But he was a man of discipline for whom contemplation and the good life were paramount, and he became the spiritual director of groups of devout laymen

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and women. Since new orders had been forbidden in 1215 and there had long existed in Holland sodalities of men and women who had lived on the verge of orthodoxy. Groote’s ‘Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life’, living in community without taking vows, and with a minimum of clerical direction, were bound to arouse suspicion and antagonism. But assisted by Florentius Radewyn (1350-1400) a devotee, co-adjutor and eventually his successor, the movement grew rapidly. The emphasis was on the life of meditation and contemplation, interspersed with manual labour which at first took the form of copying books and manuscripts. As in other movements which had begun with the laity, a clerical element became indispensable, and this centred in the Augustinian Canons, begin¬ ning at Windesheim. The relation of the movement to education has, it seems, been misconceived. Not until the last half of the fifteenth century did the Brethren found schools or take a direct part in education. Rather they established hostels, a little like modern chaplaincies in University Halls of Residence, where they exercised spiritual supervision of adolescents - an invaluable supplement to the teaching of the civic schools. The movement gradually infiltrated south, via Munster in Westphalia, and by mid-fifteenth century had penetrated South Germany, where Gabriel Biel was its best-known adherent. By the end of a century-and-a-half most currents of renewal seem to silt up, and we could do with a fuller knowledge of what happened to the ‘Modern Devotion’ at its latter end (but see R. R. Post, The Modern Devotion, 1968, ch. 15). Certainly the movement contri¬ buted to the reform of the church, not in a spectacular way but by refreshing its life at the roots. Like English Puritanism it had its own brand of edifying literature, letters, diaries and spiritual biographies; and it produced a small but important number of spiritual exercises, Christocentric in devotion. Among these were the Devota Exercitia Passionis of Dirk of Hexen (1457), the De spiritualihus ascensionibus of Zerbold von Zutphen, and Jan Mombaer’s Rosetum exercitiorum spiritualium et sacrarum meditationum (1494) a work with lingering influence on both Catholic (Ignatius Loyola) and Protestant (Joseph Hall and Richard Baxter) spirituality. But the one classic which gives the full flavour of the movement is the Imitation of Christ of Thomas k Kempis. This work came to exist in 700 MS Sin a few years, has been translated into 95 languages and in 3000 editions. Its great virtues are obvious: it is short and succinct, and its lapidary sentences and short paragraphs are admirably suited to meditation. The Imitation of Christ is an apt title, for it is concerned with devotion to Christ and its emphasis is on him as ‘The Christian’s Pattern’ (a seventeenth-century title for the work). But the little book does not invite or deserve the kind of criticism levelled at this type of piety by Lutherans, that it is set under the sign of the law, and suggests a mere outward imitation. Rather it is concerned with the life of Christ in the soul, in simple dialogue between the Lord and the believer, with plain but profound insight into the selfishness and frailty of the human soul. Somewhere here is the clue to its astonishing survival-value, and the reason why so many diverse Christians from William Law and John Wesley to Edith Cavell and Dietrich Bonhoeffer have turned to it for light and comfort.

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The relation between the ‘Modern Devotion’ and northern humanism has been much debated in recent years, and it must be confessed that there is within it an ascetic and even an anti-intellectualist strain which did not tend to the improvement of learning. It seems to have led to the rigorist austerity of a Jean Standonck at Paris, and the obscurantism of the young ‘barbarians’ against whom the young Erasmus so vehemently reacted. NICHOLAS OF CUSA (1401-64). In the thought of this great German churchman, theologian and seer, we see, even more clearly than with Gerson, how the rational scholasticism of earlier centuries came to be supplemented by other traditions, by the Augustinian and Platonic tradi¬ tion in Pseudo-Dionysius, resting on the mystical learning of Eckhart and Raymond Lull, and able in consequence to turn to the new questions of the widening world of the Renaissance. Here Nicholas of Cusa, firmly rooted in his own age, stands between it and a new world struggling to be born. Like Gerson he was deeply committed to the struggle for reform: and for him too this was no academic matter but the fight through long years against the contradictions of both saints and sinners, in long, wearing and frustrating journeys, and at councils and synods, in the attempt to win back the Bohemians, the Greeks, to communion with the Western Church, and to confront Islam not simply with war and with polemic, but with reasonable understanding. No wonder that in our time, men have come to stress the modernity of his approach. And with all this there was that which came upon him daily, the care of the churches in Germany, and in his own diocese of Brixen, a struggle in an age of growing violence, in which he had to contend with the fierce antagonism of Duke Sigismund and that astonish¬ ing fire-breathing female dragon the Abbess Verena von Stuben. His literary, scientific, mathematical and astronomical studies, his philosophic and theological writings, and what we might call his concern for compara¬ tive religion need to be set in this context of practical achievement, and of conflicts for which he was perhaps unfitted by temperament. Born at Cusa on the Moselle, he had thorough training in learning at Heidelberg and Padua, though he took his doctorate in law. At first a moderate Conciliarist, he came to see the Papacy as the only hope of lasting reform and became a valued servant first of Eugenius IV, then of Nicholas V and finally of his friend and fellow humanist, Pius II, in that brief moment when it seemed that the best humanist hopes might be realized and a reform achieved which might, as has been said ‘have taken the wind out of the sails of Martin Luther’. Though indebted to the Augustinian and Dionysian tradition, he de¬ veloped his own views with astonishing independence. Against a rationalist tradition which would smooth and explain difficulties, Nicholas found a key to truth in recognizing the limitations of human knowledge of divine things, not the ignorance of brutes without understanding but a ‘learned ignorance’ (1docta Ignorantia) in the presence of God: he underlines what Thomas and Eckhart and Dionysius had said about the via negativa and the via eminentiae, the partial analogies of all language and symbols. And he sustains and illustrates his points from his own great knowledge of mathe-

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matics and astronomy. God is the one who unites all opposites: there is in Him the true coincidence of all polarities of knowledge, just as God is the deep underlying cause of the unity of the universe and of the nature of man. These antinomies are not played down but accepted in their polarity, but without giving up in despair since God unites all apparent contra¬ dictions in his own Triune existence. This gives Nicholas his ecumenical and eirenical faith, for not only the stars in their courses, but God himself is on the side of unity and peace. These views are startling against the background of the Hussite wars, of the deep antipathies between the Latin and Greek churches and the ominous nearness of Islam represented by Mahomet II the conqueror of Constantinople. Hence the marvel of his great eirenical writings, the De Concordantia catholica (1433). concerned with the harmony between body and soul of the Church, Empire and priesthood: his De Pace fidei, a Utopian vision of a concord of all faiths, signed in heaven, but summoning men on earth to seek what is true and Christian in all religions of the world, and his Cribratio Alchemi (Sifting of the Alchemist) which is not so much a refuta¬ tion^ the errors of Islam as an invitation to dialogue. Against his humanist background he presents a forward-looking view of truth in relation to science, and the renaissance view of man which his own age could but partially appreciate, though some among the German humanists like Reuchlin and (startlingly) Thomas Miintzer appear to echo his eclectic Platonism. No wonder there are those who nowadays think of Nicholas of Cusa as a kind of fifteenth-century Teilhard de Chardin only now coming into his own. MARSILIUS FICINO (1439-99) and Florentine Platonism. To turn from Nicholas of Cusa, in journeyings oft, to Marsilius Ficino, who never left his native Florence, is to turn to a contrasting personality, yet one who in the realms of the mind and imagination may have been the more daring voyager. A great deal of humanism was concerned with the revival of classical letters, with poetry, history and moralistic enquiry, but Florentine Platonism marks the convergence, as Trinkhaus has suggested, of philo¬ sophical and theological humanism in Italy. Ficino himself, ordained in mature life, was a poet and man of medicine, a lover of music, and of friendship. There is about his circle and its relation to Lorenzo de Medici, something of that dilettantism never far from human¬ ism, as perhaps Ficino’s correspondence reveals. But it was his Greek learning which enabled him to become the translator and transmitter of ancient wisdom. Most important were his translations of Plato - the lovely bust of him at Florence shows him strumming a volume of Plato like a lyre. These were followed by important Neoplatonic writings and an edition of Dionysius. Of seminal influence was his publication of the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, whom his age took to be an ancient Egyptian sage whose teachings were older than Moses. Henceforth the Hermetic writings haunt Platonist writings until the time of Thomas Vaughan and the Cambridge Platonists. Ficino’s most famous work was his defence of the immortality of the soul. It was the work of Ficino and his friend Pico della

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Mirandola (1463-94) to express the Renaissance view of the indelible image of God in man, as in Mirandola’s remarkable tract Of the Dignity of Man. To Ficino’s mastery of Greek, the younger genius brought Hebrew and oriental study, and added to Platonic, Neoplatonic and Egyptian mysticism the speculations of the Jewish Cabbala. In a way perhaps only superficially similar to Nicholas of Cusa, Ficino and Mirandola sought clues to a primitive religion more ancient than Judaism and Christianity, a fundamental and reconciling point of unity behind all faiths, though they never denied the authenticity and uniqueness of the Christian revelation. There is an element in their thinking which edges off into the late medieval and renaissance underworld of magic, alchemy, astrology. Ficino believed in and practised white magic, as his use of the Orphic songs reveals. These diverse impulses had influence on northern humanism. Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516), though as a historian and book collector he is closer to the south German humanism of Celtis and Wimpfeling, shared a taste for daring speculation in the realm of white magic and in the mysteries of numerology. Reuchlin was a devoted Cabbalist whose interests passed to Osiander the Reformer of Nuremberg, while in England John Colet and in France Lefevre of Staples were immersed in the Pseudo-Dionysian writings. Erasmus, rather significantly, had no sympathy with this side of the Platonist revival, beyond some early dabbling in the mystical content of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Fifteenth-century Scholasticism While modern scholarship in the work of Ritter, Grabmann, Vignaux, Bohner and Oberman has modified the view of late scholasticism as a time of disintegration, there were causes, as we have noted, for the apparent eclectism whereby Nominalists and Realists were affected by cross-currents of Augustinian, Platonic thought or by mystical religion. There is evidence to support Lortz’s view of an age dogmatically marked by ‘Unklarheit’ - an absence of definition, an ambivalence, as might be seen in Biel’s eucharistic treatise with its absence of any real attempt to relate the uniqueness of the Cross to the repeated sacrifices of the Mass. But there is evidence to support the attacks by Erasmus and by Luther on sophistry and hair-splitting and the sectarian in-fighting to which Gerson had earlier referred. The great quarrel at Louvain (1465-75) concerning ‘future contingents' not only set the University in uproar but penetrated to Rome on the one hand and even more devastatingly to Paris where Louis XI banned the Nominalists in 1473. There are three scholastic theologians who have received perhaps more attention than they deserve (Bartholomew of Usingen and John Paltz may one day be seen as more interesting thinkers) by reason of Ullmann’s famous study of them as Reformers before the Reformation [E. Tr. (1885)]. John of Wesel (c. 1400-81) attracts attention because he was a man of learning (D.D. Erfurt, 1456) and for a short time a Professor at Basle. He got into trouble, perhaps because he discussed in the pulpit matters which had he kept them to the schools might not have led to danger, as when he attacked Indulgences and the theology of the ‘Filioque’ clause (see p. 237).

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3oi

In 1497 he fell among inquisitors and suffered the worst fate of all for a medieval heretic, a recantation followed by perpetual imprisonment until his death, which mercifully soon followed. John Pufper of Goch (d. 1475) was a secular priest who died as Rector of a Convent of Augustinian sisters at Sluis near Malines. He seems to have been a Nominalist theologian, with some Augustinian stresses. He gave high place to the authority of scripture and to the authority of the church only in so far as it expressed scriptural truth. He attacked monastic vows and the distinction between precepts and counsels. Augustinian perhaps is his teaching about man’s acceptance by God as conditioned only by God’s sovereign freedom, and perhaps his adherence to the doctrine of the ultimate fruition of God. Negatively he attacked the teaching of Thomas Aquinas about merit. He seems to have had no direct connectionwith the Brothers of the Common Life (R. R. Post). Wessel Gansfort is the most impressive of the three. He was a layman and both in his own schooling and in his residence in their hostels came into close contact with the Brothers of the Common Life, while at the end of his life he returned to them and to the cultivation of the ‘Modern Devotion’. He studied in Cologne, Heidelberg and Paris and spent some time in Italy. He was learned in medicine and in the sacred languages - if he anticipates anybody it is not Luther but Vadianus, the humanist doctor of St. Gall. He began as a realist but left the via antiqua for Nominalism, and then developed in the Gersonian way a growing sense of the importance of the life of contemplation. He showed himself severely critical of high papalist claims of indulgences, and of those who laid too great stress on the objectivity of sacramental teaching. He retired to Agnetenberg (1477-82) under the protection of the Bishop David of Utrecht. He influenced Jan Mombaer, and some of his writings (edited as the Farrago (1522) with a preface by Luther) had repercussions in the early days of the Reformation. GABRIEL BIEL (c. 1420-95) is a more considerable figure than the three so-called 'reformers before the Reformation’, a man of great learning if of limited genius, who combined his scholasticism with a career of pastoral care and preaching. Unlike Wesel, Pupper and Gansfort he was strongly Papalist and in the struggle between Pius II and Diether of Mainz he supported papal authority which he expounded in his Defensorium Obedientiae Apostolicum (1462). He was born in Speyer and went to Heidel¬ berg, Erfurt and Cologne, ending as Professor at the new south German University of Tubingen. In 1468 he became Provost of the house of the Brothers of the Common Life at Butzbach and ended his days in another house of the order at Tubingen. In him the ‘Modern Devotion’ marked its deepest penetration into Germany and its most distinguished convert. His scholastic thinking is within the frame of late medieval spirituality (whether ‘mystical’ is a right word to use of him seems doubtful). His exposition of the Canon of the Mass was a famous text-book (Luther was trained on it) but most of it is gathered from other sources and it is of little originality. Similarly his ‘Commentary on the Sentences’ is rather a Collectorium of Ockhamist ideas. His preaching is important, for he took its theology very seriously and rated it more highly than attendance at Mass. There is a

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strong Mariological interest in his preaching. While, as a good Ockhamist’ he stressed the liberty of God and the freedom of man and made full use of the dialectic of the ‘Potestas absoluta' and ‘Potestas ordinata’ (see Index s.v.) he also made much of the doctrine of merit and the need for man to do what in him lies ‘Facere quod in se est'. Oberman judges his thoughts to be semi-Pelagian and Luther vehemently attacked this element in Biel. But one must be careful about the word ‘Pelagian’ which easily becomes anachronistic in discussions about the later Middle Ages. In Peter of Auriol it seems to have stood for the view that a man can have rights over and against God (Vignaux); but often when a writer seems outrageously Pelagian he has a way of standing everything upon its head and ascribing all to grace. In Biel, too, much is made of the tension between fear and love, between the ‘justitia’ and the ‘bonitas’ and ‘misericordia’ of God which would some day be a stumbling-block to the young Luther. Among lesser figures in the half-century before Luther must be included Johannes Staupitz, in whom Augustinian elements are joined with a ‘theologia crucis’, linked with Tauler and the German mystical tradition. ERASMUS (1469-1536), the greatest figure in the northern Renaissance, is an indispensable link between the overlapping themes of humanism and reformation, but in what sense he is important for the historian of doctrine is a complex problem, raised acutely in the recent fifth-centenary celebra¬ tions, which as distinct from earlier studies (Allen, Renaudet, Huizinga) probe the question of his theological status. The older views can still be accepted: he was an outspoken critic of the contemporary Church, as vehement in his way as Hutten or Rubeanus, and he did not fear to attack individual Popes (like Julius II, ‘his most intimate enemy’) for the obvious contrast between their life-style and that of the apostles. Yet he accepted the authority of the Church while stressing (with his friend Sir Thomas More) the importance of the ‘communis sensus fidelium’ - ‘the consensus of the faithful’. But in matters where the church had not declared its mind Erasmus held it right to suspend judgment and even to follow in the path of the sceptics. He attacked, with Colet and More, that excessive legalism in late-medieval religion which Burnet called ‘superannuated Judaism’. His combination of ‘good’ with ‘sacred’ letters was linked on the one hand with Italian humanism and on the other with the ‘Modern Devotion’. He disliked Hebrew and concentrated on Greek and on New Testament studies, and to some extent filled his ethics with the best classical moralism. He was not only indebted to Platonism (this may have been exaggerated) but also to Stoicism and Epicureanism; and with Thomas More he shared a passion for Lucian. He is plainly in the Italian humanist tradition with its ideals of ‘eruditio’ and ‘humanitas’. Bene has shown how deeply he was indebted to Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana and how he followed him in his dis¬ crimination of the extent to which Christians might ‘spoil the Egyptians’ of classical culture. About his relation to the ‘Modern Devotion’ the last word has not yet been said. He hated the obscurantism of some of his fellow Augustinians who decried poetry and classical learning, or indeed any learning at all, and

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he had little sympathy with ascetic rigorism. Yet in his search for a simpler religion, his turning to the scriptures and above all to the ‘philosophy of Christ' in the gospels and epistles, he is surely linked with the ‘Modem Devotion’. There is some evidence that he never troubled to master scholastic teaching, and he certainly attacked the sophistries of the Scotists as heartily as Tyndale or Luther. But this ‘philosophy of Christ’, as he developed it from the time of his seminal tract the Enchiridion (1503) and in a series of edifying tracts, but above all in his New Testament manifestoes — his Prefaces to the New Testament (1516 and 1519) and his Letter to Volzius (1518), seeing it as a re-statement of the Christian religion as a divine life, is serious theology of first importance. Grounded on the humanist principles of Valla which sought the importance of a scriptural text in its strictly grammatical and philological context, he proceeded to seek a better Greek text of the New Testament and on its basis a new Latin version. To this he added a noble plea for the ‘open Bible’ and indicated a new method of biblical and theological study which was to be taken up by Melanchthon and by the reformed theologians Musculus, Bullinger and Calvin. All this certainly gives Erasmus the status of a New Testament theo¬ logian. To this must be added the impact of the massive series of editions of the Fathers of West and East: if at the end he left the chores of editing to others, his was the over-all responsibility, and we must never underrate the importance of the availability for scholars of these new printed texts, let alone the explosive character of some of them such as the edition of Tertullian by Beatus Rhenanus and Erasmus’s own publication of Origen. Beyond this it would be perilous to claim Erasmus as a considerable theologian. Those who have thought to find theological depth in him have in recent years concentrated on isolated texts, the Enchiridion, the New Testament prefaces, the Letter to Volzius. E. W. Kohls, who sees Erasmus as steeped in St. Thomas, and relying on that broad sweep of the plan of redemption as ‘exitus-reditus’ (all things ‘going out from’ God and ‘return¬ ing to’ God) which had been expounded from Erigena onwards - seems to read much into Erasmus and perhaps to misconceive what was really simply the acceptance by Erasmus of the common catholic tradition. Manfred Hofmann gives to Erasmus an epistemology of amazing depth, ‘a philosophic system concentrated in Christology, of encyclopaedic breadth': but again one wonders if this is really Erasmus. Most persuasive of all G. Chantraine in his beautiful study of Mystere et philosophic du Christ selon lirasme (1971) shows that Erasmus certainly had a religion, and a spirituality of depth, but even he has to say that Erasmus ‘does not love abstract arguments; he is an artist’. And the writer of the most detailed examination of the sacramental teaching of Erasmus (J. B. Payne) is constrained to make most damaging admissions, as that ‘Erasmus is but little aware of the tension between God’s love and his wrath, his mercy and his justice, he does not feel the need of Christ as an expiation and satisfaction for our sins’. When he goes on to say that Erasmus shared an ‘Origenistic subordinationism about the Person of Christ’ but that other facets of his teaching have ‘an Antiochian ring', we may wonder how far the word ‘theologian’ can be applied, though it helps us to understand how in the

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next decade after Erasmus’ death the city of Basle became a city of refuge for those who criticized accepted orthodoxy. It is not, therefore, simply the superficiality of much of his De libero arbitrio - hardly offset by the much more impressive second part of his Hyperaspistes - that raises doubts about his eminence as a theologian. He was a New Testament and patristic scholar of first-class importance (in the context of his time), and a pioneer in new educational and theological method: a Christian whose spirituality has depth, who can in no way be written off as an educationist whose thought centres in anthropology, but one who gives a central place to mystery and grace. Beyond this he would not seem to compare favourably with the greater schoolmen or the more eminent Reformers, or deserve to rank among those who have touched the great issues of Christian doctrine at the point of depth, from Augustine and St. Thomas to Calvin and Karl Barth.

A Note on Theology in the Christian East: the Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries Kallistos Ware

A Note on Theology in the Christian East: the Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries Kallistos Ware

Greek religious thought during the Turkish period - between the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821 - is marked by two opposite tendencies: on the one hand an extreme conservatism, and on the other a movement towards westernization, either in a Roman Catholic or a Protestant direction. These two characteristics may seem at first sight contradictory, but both are easily intelligible in view of the situation which Orthodox Christendom occupied under the Turks. (1) Conservatism. The Turkish period was not a happy era for the Greek Church. Oppressed as they were under Muslim masters, treated always as second-class citizens and kept in a position of social inferiority, Greek Christians naturally felt themselves on the defensive and developed a ‘siege’ mentality. Their great aim was survival — to keep things going in the hope of better days to come. They clung with marvellous tenacity to their Byzantine inheritance, but they had little possibility to develop that in¬ heritance creatively. The vitality and originality which Greek theology displayed as late as the fourteenth century in the time of Palamas - and even in the mid-fifteenth century with such a writer as George Scholarios disappeared almost entirely as the fifteenth century drew to a close. The ‘ossification’, which some historians unjustly attribute to the later Byzan¬ tine era, did indeed become a mark of Greek religious thought in the Turkish period. Theology became, in a way that it had not been in the eleventh or fourteenth century, a matter of repeating accepted formulae and defending entrenched positions. The prevailing outlook of unyielding traditionalism is well expressed by Patriarch Jeremias II of Constantinople in 1590: ‘It is not the practice of our Church to innovate in any way whatsoever, whereas the Western Church innovates unceasingly . . . We do not dare to remove from the ancient books a single “jot or tittle’’, as the saying goes. So we were taught and such is our purpose - to obey and to be subject to those who went before us.’ This conservatism had one great advantage: at least the Patristic tradition of the Christian east was never entirely forgotten, even though it was understood in an unduly narrow and inflexible manner. (2) Westernization. ‘Ossification’, however, is but one side of the picture. Turkish rule had a second and somewhat different effect on Greek religious thinking. The prevailing poverty of the Greek world, the lack of libraries and of centres of scholarship, forced many Greeks to travel to the west for their university studies; and so they received their theological training from Catholic or Protestant masters. This background, Roman or Reformed, as

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the case might be, was usually apparent in their writings: even when they strove to defend the Orthodox faith against western propaganda, they tended to use western types of argument and to apply western categories and terminology, foreign to that tradition of Patristic and Byzantine thought which was properly their own. In this way Greek theology under¬ went a kind of ‘pseudomorphosis’, being forced into alien moulds; and Greek theologians of the Turkish period can be divided into two main classes, the ‘Latinizers’ and the ‘Protestantizers’. Many of them were deliberately eclectic, using whatever came most readily to hand - Roman arguments against the Reformers and Protestant arguments against Rome. In such a situation there was a real danger that the distinctive mentality of the Orthodox east might be lost or at any rate obscured. In this way, beneath an outward appearance of rigid traditionalism, Orthodoxy was steadily infiltrated by influences from the west. The most important period for Greek theology of the post-Byzantine era was the hundred years between 1573 and 1672. During these ten decades Orthodoxy was brought face to face with the forces of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and was compelled to define its attitude towards the new religious situation that had arisen in the west. The confrontation occurred in three main stages: (a) Jeremias II and the Lutherans. From the early days of the Reforma¬ tion, the Lutherans looked to Orthodoxy for support in their conflict with Rome. ‘The Orthodox Christians have the same faith as ourselves,’ declared Luther in 1520, ‘they baptize as we do, they live as we do.’ The first serious attempt by the Lutherans at a theological ‘dialogue’ with the east was in 1:573, when a group of scholars from Tiibingen visited Constantinople; and after their return home these Tubingen theologians maintained an important correspondence with Patriarch Jeremias II during the years 1574-81. Among the topics discussed were the relations between grace and free will, between Scripture and Tradition, the nature of the sacraments - especially the eucharist and the priesthood - and the practice of praying for the dead and invoking the intercessions of the saints. The Lutherans evidently hoped to initiate some kind of reformation among the Greeks, but in this they were not successful. In his answers Jeremias adhered carefully to the traditional Orthodox teaching, without inclining either in a Protestant or a Roman direction. (b) Cyril Lukaris and the Calvinists. The second important exchange between Orthodoxy and Protestantism occurred some fifty years later, when Cyril Lukaris was Patriarch of Constantinople (1621-38). Whereas Patriarch Jeremias had remained firmly loyal to the accepted Orthodox teaching, Cyril was more adventurous. Under Calvinist influence he com¬ posed — or at any rate appended his signature to - a Confession of Faith, published at Geneva in 1629. In this he adopted the standard Calvinist teaching upon predestination and election, and there is little to distinguish his doctrine of the Church and the sacraments from that of Protestantism. He states that the witness of Scripture is far higher than that of the Church (i.e., of the Ecumenical Councils); he rejects belief in the Church’s infalli¬ bility, and stresses its invisible rather than its visible aspect; he teaches

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that there are two sacraments, not seven; he rejects transubstantiation, stating that Christ’s presence in the encharist is ‘spiritual’ only. (c) The Latinizing reaction. Cyril Lukaris is the extreme example of a Greek ‘Protestantizer’. Although he had some followers, his viewpoint was clearly unacceptable to the Orthodox world at large. His Confession was condemned by no less than six Orthodox councils between 1638 and 1691, the most important of these being the Councils of Jassy (1642) and of Jerusalem (1672). In direct reaction to Cyril, two other Orthodox hierarchs wrote Confessions of their own: Peter of Moghila, Metropolitan of Kiev (whose Orthodox Confession was ratified, after extensive modifications, at Jassy in 1642); and Patriarch Dositheus of Jerusalem (whose Confession was adopted at Jerusalem in 1672). Peter and Dositheus are the most notable of the Orthodox ‘Latinizers’: both, for example, employed the term ‘transubstantiation’,1 and when discussing the state of the departed both approach close to the Latin notion of purgatory. But in their ‘Latinism’ they were far less radical than was Cyril Lukaris in his Calvinism. Cyril is a Protestant in the substance of his thought; Peter of Moghila and Dositheus are Latin in method and terminology, but Orthodox in their basic convictions. The seventeenth century, while not a period in which Orthodox theology is to be seen at its best, possesses none the less a considerable importance for the history of doctrine in the Christian east. The Reformation contro¬ versies raised problems about the sacraments, and about the nature and authority of the Church, which neither the Ecumenical Councils nor the Church of the later Byzantine Empire had been required to face. It was important for Orthodoxy to clarify its teaching on these matters and to define its position in relation to the Protestant-Catholic debate. This was the task which the Councils of Jassy and Jerusalem, for all their short¬ comings, managed to fulfil.

1 The first Greek theologian to employ this term seems to have been George Scholarios in the fifteenth century. It reappears in the writings of Meletios Pigas and Gabriel Severus at the end of the sixteenth century and thereafter becomes frequent in Orthodox authors. But there were always some Orthodox theologians who deliberately avoided its use.

'

Martin Luther

Benjamin Drewery

Martin Luther Introduction Benjamin

Drewery

The history of Christian doctrine has been marked by a select succession of master-minds - S. Paul, Origen, Augustine, Aquinas - who have not only stamped their personal seal on the crises and advances of their day, but continue to fertilize and fructify the course of all subsequent theology. To this exalted company, beyond cavil, belongs Martin Luther. Protestantism in all its fissiparous manifestations has for nearly five centuries drawn on him as its earthly fountain-head, and the twentieth century has witnessed the overflowing of the Lutheran streams into the pasturage of Catholicism and even of Orthodoxy. Yet the exposition and evaluation of Luther’s theology remains a matter of almost unparalleled complexity. First, there is the sheer bulk of his writings; the great Weimar Edition, begun in 1883, approaches its completion in nearly sixty vast volumes. Then there is the unfamiliarity of his language and thought-forms, especially to the English-speaking. This is intensified by his complex historical setting; he was not so much zwischen den Zeiten as one who spans like no other the dying and the rising of two worlds. Nor does his temperament and character simplify the quest; tempestuous, prophetic, profoundly learned yet totally committed to the human drama, appealing and exasperating, argumenta¬ tive, contradictory, ironical, with something of the mystic and much of the party manager, a man of the people and supremely a man of God - the last thing Luther intended was to make life easy for later systematic theologians. The very process of his development - the late medieval monk, the arch-rebel of the religious revolution, the matured father-figure of the Reformation - makes systematic analysis of his thought a hazardous and at times an almost despairing venture. To all this must be added the immense renascence of modern Luther-scholarship, beginning in Germany with Karl Holl and built up on the Continent and in Scandinavia into such a gigantic monument of learning that hardly a sentence can be written on Luther which some monograph or volume could not be found to have anticipated, modified or disproved. ‘The phenomenon of the theology of Luther, to which one might give an altogether different name, is instructive enough for the dangers which threaten an “irregular dogmatics’’. Yet - it admitted of incorporation into the school-theology of Melanchthon and Calvin and their successors, and all that may have been lost in the process should not preclude acknowledge¬ ment that it was necessary.’ Karl Barth is here (C.D. I/i, 32of.) setting out his own programme of ‘regular dogmatics'; and his warning that such a

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discipline ‘sleeps through’ the existence of other forms of theology at its peril is illustrated by his own more numerous citations of Luther than of Calvin himself. Yet his claim is valid. If Luther admitted of no incorpora¬ tion into a formulated theology - if he made no contribution even to a scientific dogmatics - this would undermine his status not only as a theologian but as prophet, preacher, scholar, ‘religious genius’ and every¬ thing else that has been claimed for him. In all these capacities he was consciously seeking or expounding truth - truth about God, man, salvation; and in the end the truth is one. The unity, the wholeness, the reality of the Christian faith are presuppositions that Luther never for one moment abandoned.

Luther’s Theology in the Making

Luther was bom in 1483 at Eisleben in Saxony. He grew up in Mansfeld wdiere his father made money as a miner and became a local councillor. He was educated at the Cathedral School at Magdeburg, where he would (significantly) be taught by the famous ‘brethren of the Common Life’; later at Eisenach, and from 1501 at Erfurt University, where he graduated in Arts. The law was then the obvious profession for a young man of his gifts, and his father was deeply angered when he entered the house of the Eremetical Order of St. Augustine at Erfurt (1505). Ordained priest in 1507, he was selected for advanced theological study at the new University of Wittenberg. In 1509 he was appointed lecturer in the Arts Faculty, and in spite of his own preference for theology he was apportioned the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. In 1510 he was sent to Rome on business of his Order, and was shocked and disillusioned by the cynical professionalism and degrading luxury of the clergy and rulers. In 1512 he took his D.D., and succeeded Staupitz as Professor of Biblical Theology. Few things are more significant, either for him or for the whole history of Protestantism, than that Luther was a Professor of Biblical Theology from a date some years before his ‘break-through’ to the day of his death. It was during his years as a monk that Luther underwent the experiences of mind and conscience that were to presage the Protestant revolution and the fine flowering of his theology. His novitiate had gone well, but Luther was not a man to do things by halves. The challenge of monasticism was nothing less than Christian perfection; and Luther had been brought up in a home where God was primarily the judge, and parental discipline laid on him that fear of God which was the beginning of wisdom. His conscience now became afflicted with sombre brooding at his own failures to satisfy the Divine imperative; his own description of that helpless remorse and futile struggling was Anfechtung, a word for which in Luther’s case (as for that ‘dark night of the soul’ through which so many Christian saints have passed) a mere psychological evaluation reaches no further than the symp¬ toms. At its heart lay Luther’s ever-deepening apprehension of God the Righteous, and if there is one master-key to the whole of his theology it is his own thousandfold repeated coram Deo (‘in God’s presence’, ‘by God’s standards'). 'Had not God come when the cool of the day arrived, Adam and Eve would never have noticed their sin. But when He came, they crept away —’ Theologically, Luther had been initiated at Erfurt into Nominalism, especially by the treatises of the Occamist Gabriel Biel (ob. 1495); and the Nominalist emphases on the sovereign freedom of God alongside the

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efficacy of the human will served to intensify rather than mitigate his own religious tribulations. The internal controversies of Nominalism found in Luther no whole-hearted partisan, but the tradition of Duns Scotus seems to have attracted him less than that of Occam, with his stress on God’s simplicity of being and his use of the distinction between God’s potestas absoluta (what God can and could do) and potestas ordinata (what God has in fact chosen to do), which opened the way to a tempering of God’s arbitrary omnipotence by the liberty of divine mercy. But at Wittenberg this controversy became overlaid by the wider and deeper battle between scholasticism as a whole and the new humanism. The Ad Fontes (‘Back to the Sources!’) of the Renaissance, with its rediscovery of the fresh springs of classical antiquity, took its Christian shape, through men like Reuchlin and supremely Erasmus of Rotterdam, in a return to the Bible and the early Fathers, with a philosophical perspective marked by a revival of Platonism as against the Aristotelianism which, though or course in origin as ‘classical’ as its rival, had entered medieval Christendom centuries earlier through alien and suspect intermediaries. Philosophically, as Barth says (C.D. I/2.728), while the medieval scholastics - and the post-reforma¬ tion Protestant scholastics - were unconcealed Aristotelians, Luther and Calvin were equally clearly Platonists, Luther more of the neo-Platomst, Calvin more the classical. The works of Gabriel Biel included a commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, which had been for centuries a kind of theological text¬ book; and for the Master of the Sentences, who significantly had antedated the invasion of Aristotelianism and its Christianized elaboration in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, Luther had a life-long regard. But through¬ out the years at Erfurt and early Wittenberg the lines of development and controversy were opening the way to a greater name — Augustine, whom Luther began to explore with passionate enthusiasm, and who above all encouraged him to cut through the ‘rancid rules of the logicians’ to the ultimate authority of the Bible. Luther’s ‘breakthrough’, as it is called (although its date and nature remain the subject of learned controversy) can perhaps be described as the culmination and undermining of all his tribulations - spiritual and theo¬ logical - by the identification and re-interpretation of the one dominant concept of the Righteousness of God. In perhaps every major historical ‘conversion’ - St. Paul, Luther, Wesley - it is possible to accuse the ‘convert’ of unfairness, conscious or unconscious, to the mentors, predecessors and traditions from which he claimed emancipation. The present century has duly witnessed from the Catholic scholar Denifle a massive attack launched on Luther at this very point, and still more learned rejoinders from Karl Holl and his school. What is hardly in doubt is that for Luther himself the spiritual pilgrimage through Nominalism and Medievalism in general to Augustine and Scripture had brought him to the ultimate scandalon, and that from his ‘breakthrough’, whatever its relation to the so-called Turmererlebnis (his ‘experience in the tower’ of the monastery at Witten¬ berg), there arose a Christian renascence which is still far from exhausted, and which falls into line with the road to Damascus and with'Aldersgate

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Street. The problem of the date of the breakthrough is not merely academic, but involves the interpretation of his own writings from 1513 to 1519 and its reconciliation with the evidence of his own autobiographical fragment of 1545. From Staupitz Luther had garnered much that was now ripening for the harvest. Although Staupitz has been claimed as a herald of the Reforma¬ tion, -he remained himself a Catholic, and not in name only: he never broke through the theological presuppositions of merit and of spiritual discipline as an ‘imitation’ of Christ. Yet Luther testifies that it was through Staupitz that ‘the light of the Gospel began first to shine out of the darkness of the heart’. Staupitz had fostered his concentration on Biblical study in depth; he had led him from Nominalism to the Augustinian emphasis on grace; he had met Luther’s time-honoured dismay at the doctrines of predestination by an assurance which startlingly adumbrates the distinctive re-appraisal of the doctrine by Karl Barth: ‘In the wounds of Jesus is predestination understood and found, and nowhere else.’ He had above all (‘as a messenger from heaven’) brought Luther a liberating comprehension of the meaning of penitence. It was here that the conventional Latin translation of ^eravoelv by poenitentiam agere had wrought such mischief, by bringing (originally no doubt unintentionally) overtones of human works of penitence, acts of ‘satisfaction’, which came to find ritual expression in the Sacrament of Penance and tended to obscure the motivating and empowering love of God. If ‘penitence’ means doing one’s stint by way of reparation, then coram Deo it is self-defeating. If (as Staupitz showed Luther) it means a total change of mind, affections, heart, then here is truly a ‘new creation’ which begins and ends, like the creation of the universe, with the mercy, love, grace of God. Hence do the ‘very commands of God grow sweet’, and the way is open for the rediscovery of the Biblical revelation of God the Righteous. This — the real ‘breakthrough’ — is best recounted in Luther’s own words. ‘I had been wondrously eager to understand Paul in the Epistle to the Romans, but hitherto I had been held up - by one word: “the righteousness of God is revealed in (the Gospel)’’ - as if it were not enough that miserable sinners, eternally ruined by original sin, should be crushed - through the law of the Ten Commandments, but that God through the Gospel must add sorrow to sorrow, and even through the Gospel bring his righteousness and wrath to bear o‘n us. - At last, as I meditated day and night, - I turned my attention to the connection of the words - “The righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written: the righteous shall live by faith’’, and I began to understand that the righteousness of God is the righteousness in which a just man lives by the gift of God, in other words by faith, and that what Paul means is this: the righteousness of God, revealed in the Gospel, is passive, in other words that by which the merciful God justifies us through faith -. There and then the whole face of Scripture was changed; I ran through the Scriptures as memory served, and collected the same analogy in other words: opus Dei - that which God works in us; virtus Dei — that by which God makes us strong; sapientia Dei - that by which He makes us wise; and so the fortitude, salvation, glory of God.’ Luther’s specific problem must not be confused with the familiar and mistaken antithesis between the ‘righteous God’ of the Old Testament Law and the ‘loving God’ of the New

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Testament Gospel. The justitia Dei which had baffled him was revealed equally by Law and Gospel, as was the liberating recovery of its true significance. The breakthrough of the Reformation as an event of world-history is usually dated from the nailing of Luther’s 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg on October 31st, 1517. Luther’s theology is still, however, in the making. If we take the Theses along with the slightly earlier 97 against the Scholastics, the Explanations of the 95 and the Theses and Proofs for the Heidelberg Disputation of the next year, and set them in the context of the New Testament lectures (Romans 1515-16, Galatians 1516-17, Hebrews 1517-18) which Luther was delivering in these years of theological ferment, we shall see the directions into which Luther’s personal breakthrough was leading him. (1) The 95 Theses were primarily an attack on the current theory and practice of Indulgences. An Indulgence was strictly the commuting of the temporal punishment for sin by an act of satisfaction prescribed by the Church - that is, the substitution of one ecclesiastical penalty for another. In earlier times the penance, for example, of long-term fasting for man¬ slaughter could be replaced by enlistment for a Crusade. Almost inevitably the practice of financial commutation crept in, especially as growing financial embarrassments afflicted the Papacy. The Bull Unigenitus of Clement VI (1343) set out a theory of Indulgences based on the Papal claim to have acquired ‘a great treasure (of redemption) for the Church militant’ through Peter and his successors, which was constantly swollen by the merits of the Virgin, the elect, and the newly redeemed. Indulgences drawn on this treasury were extended by Pope Sixtus IV in his Bull Salvator Noster (1476) to the souls in purgatory; money payments by the living could shorten or terminate their time in this condition. Vital distinctions between guilt and penalty, penitence and satisfaction, forgiveness and indulgence — had by Luther’s time become blurred, and the whole sacrum negotium of financial commutation (even for such laudable aims as the building of St. Peter’s) a crying scandal. Moralists and theologians were already protesting, and some German state authorities taking preventive action. Luther’s immediate concern in the Theses was not to deny but to circum¬ scribe the authority of Pope and priest; remission or commutation, he insisted, was limited to penalties the Church itself had imposed. The guilt of sin and its forgiveness were reserved for the judgement of God, and the discretion left to His ministers was declaratory only. The outward sign - the submission of penance - while necessary, is nothing without inward peni¬ tence, and this penitence embraces the whole lives of believers. Moreover, the penitential canons apply only to the living; the real penalty of purgatory is the fear springing from consciousness of guilt in a dying man. The Papal power is not plenary - there is no ‘power of the keys’ - but intercessory; and true penitence properly understood (that is, coram Deo) is a privilege: ‘true contrition seeks out and loves to pay the penalties of sin, whereas Indulgences relax the penalties and make men resent them.’ (2) Luther’s reaction against scholasticism and Indulgences was serving

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to distil from his own theological ferment a number of themes, antitheses, catchwords that his N.T. commentaries were simultaneously exploring and expanding into his matured theology of #520 onwards. His deepening knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, his concentration on Augustine and St. Paul, are serving not merely to activate protest against current ecclesiastical abuses and theological infelicities, but to undermine the whole medieval structure of human merit and reward. As the Righteousness of God, newly interpreted, dominates more and more the theological landscape, any lingering validity of man’s own ‘works’ gives way to a whole complex of associations centring on ‘grace’ and ‘faith’, the twin watchwords of the presence alike of the Risen Christ and the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer. We find in antithesis ‘God hidden’/‘God revealed’; Christ’s ‘strange work’/ His ‘proper work’; Law/Gospel; grace/nature; the bondage of the sinful will/ cheerful and un-selfregarding Christian obedience. God wills to save us, not by our own (domesticam) righteousness, but by a righteousness from without {extrinsecam, alienam), coming from heaven. Faith is not a human ‘good work’ but the obverse of grace, contrasting not with reason but with sensus (‘wisdom of the flesh’, self-confidence). Famous Lutheran phrases are now heard - simul peccator et justus; semper peccator, semper penitens, semper justus; ‘the saints are inwardly always sinners and outwardly always justified’. We are given the dynamic progression from self-accusation through humility to faith. Above all there resounds the characteristic Lutheran ‘alone’ — sola fide, sola misericordia, solo evangelio, sola gratia, per Christum solum. In this context the Law ceases to be merely ceremonial or a passing phase in God’s dispensation, and is seen as every demand made on the outward man which does not reach to the agreement of his will, just as ‘concupiscence’ is no longer the mere lusts of the flesh but the total inward-orientation of the self in its egoistic rebellion against God. Every¬ thing - including anthropology - is coram Deo, and we meet with the Lutheran use of larva (‘mask’, ‘veil’) for the face that is turned to the world, as contrasted with the inner self - the heart — which is seen by God. It is the Holy Spirit which converts faith from a mere fides historica or even a dogmatic structure into the very presence of Christ, and hence ‘faith is indivisible’. (3) But above all in these years there emerges the seminal Lutheran ‘theology of the Cross'. The modern English reader, mindfui of his own immediate theological ancestry, might presume an antithesis with ‘theology of the Incarnation’. But Luther’s antithesis is ‘theology of Glory’, by which he means the vain and presumptuous endeavour to penetrate directly to the ‘naked majesty of God’ either through the scholastic methods of inferential and speculative reason or through the anagoge - the ‘ecstatic ascent’ - of mysticism. The true knowledge of God is to be found only in the theology of the Cross, God’s chosen way of self-revelation to the blinded vision, the stunted reason and the bruised conscience of man. ‘The Cross alone is our theology’; 'the Cross proves everything’; ‘the Cross of Christ meets us everywhere in the Scriptures’. Luther was never to outgrow these central affirmations, which were the real legacy of these formative years of

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storm and stress, and which none of his opponents, with the possible exception of Cardinal Cajetan, came near to appreciating. Scholastic speculation on the attributes of God, with its well-trodden pathways of the analogia entis and the via negativa (see Index s.vv.), was open from Luther’s standpoint to fatal objections. From one aspect it led to a mere deification of sinful humanity. If man makes his own way to God, the God he attains is but himself writ large. From another, its telos (‘goal’) could only be a God who was a complex of abstract metaphysical concepts, progressively apprehensible by the increasingly rarefied subtleties of human intelligence. Such may well have been the ideal of Aristotle. Far different was the God of the Bible. If its ‘ethical monotheism’ is to be taken seriously, it implies of necessity, first, a God whose transcendence is apprehensible only through His own self-disclosure, and secondly, a God whose concern is not with the ethically neutral human intelligence in isolation, but with man in his totality, and hence the ‘knowledge’ so imparted broadens into that enlightenment of reason, conscience and will which can only be called ‘salvation’. On both these grounds, the gap - or rather the abyss - between the infinite qualitative remoteness of God and the exceeding sinfulness of the sinner can only be bridged by a Mediator who in Himself embodies the glory of God accommodated to our suffering humanity, which indeed He shares - and shares to the lowest possible depths of its bitterness and desolation. Our sin and ignorance may bring us low enough in the scale of suffering and degradation; they are unlikely to bring us lower than the Cross - and Christ has been there. ‘God is not to be found save in the Cross’, and like Paul, Luther was determined to know nothing save Jesus Christ and Him crucified. The mystical anagoge - the other form of the ‘Theology of Glory’ — raises the perplexing question of Luther’s relation to Christian mysticism. In this matter he shows an ambivalence foreshadowing in some respects that of John Wesley, who could reverence the great Christian mystics while at the same time exercising an unsparing blue-pencil on mystical passages in his brother’s finest hymns. Wesley’s concern was the apparent by-passing by mystical ‘quietism’ of Church and sacraments; Luther’s, more fundamen¬ tally, of Christ and His Cross. The overt villain of the piece was (pseudo)Dionysius; but one can trace here a tradition going back at least to Origen. Origen’s copiousness of thought and language does not make for systematic consistency; but in some moods at any rate he can suggest that the words of I Cor. 2.6f. were ‘spoken to those who had no need of apprehending the Word of God in so far as He was made flesh, but in His capacity of Wisdom “hidden in a mystery” ’ (Horn. Exod. XII.4). The incarnate and crucified Saviour is correlated with ‘imperfect knowledge’, whereas the Holy Spirit brings ‘perfect wisdom’ to the sanctified. The Cross is perhaps not so much by-passed as made obsolete; mere faith has been left behind, lost in Wisdom and no longer even relevant. This was the real root of the mystical tradition which Luther was repudi¬ ating. Faith for him is never lost in Wisdom but in ‘Sight’, and not so much lost as transformed into adoration. The Cross of Christ is the eternal focus of a faith which is never outgrown even by the saints, whereas the mystical

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ascent is a denial of God’s providential plan for mankind. ‘God will not have thee thus ascend, but He comes to thee and has made a ladder, a way and a bridge to thee. His Son speaks - “This way, brother — keep thine eyes fixed on Me, through My humanity is the way to the Father.” ’ Or again: ‘It is not sufficient for anyone, and it does him no good, to recognize God in His glory and majesty, unless he recognizes Him in the humility and shame of the Cross. Thus God destroys the wisdom of the wise —. So also, in John 14, where Philip spoke in the manner of the theology of glory: “Show us the Father.” Christ forthwith set aside his flighty thought about seeing God elsewhere and led him to Himself. True theology and the recognition of God are in the crucified Christ.’ So much seems clear; yet the heritage of mysticism, which had contri¬ buted so largely to the revival of spirituality in late medieval Germany, was compounded of other elements as well as the anagoge of Origen and pseudoDionysius. There was, for example, as Professor Rupp has reminded us (.Luther for an Ecumenical Age ed. Meyer, p. 70), ‘an older Thuringian emphasis on the “wounds of Jesus” going back to the Gertrudes and Mechthilds of the 12th century’, which brought to bear a mystical influence on some German theologians of our period, and especially on Staupitz. Through him Luther was introduced to Tauler, the fourteenth-century Dominican mystic, in whose sermons (which he annotated) he found adumbrated the theology of the Cross; and the anonymous Theologia Germanica, the first printed edition of which Luther supervised during the years of his ‘break-through’, seemed to him to distil the legitimate essence of Tauler himself. Luther’s own theology of the Cross begins to glow with a mystical radiance which probably owes as much to this tradition as to its primary sources in Augustine and St. Paul. ‘God’s commands grow sweet indeed when we learn to read them not so much in books as in the Wounds of our Blessed Redeemer.’ ‘It is a great matter to be a Christian man, and to have a life hidden away, not in some place like a hermit, nor in his own heart, though that is an unsearchable depth, but in the invisible God him¬ self, and to live thus in the world, but to feed on that which is never seen, except by way of the Word —’ The theology of the Cross takes up one strand of medieval mysticism while repudiating others. In the end, with Luther as with Wesley, there is something in Christian mysticism he cannot resist - provided that it is a mysticism of the Cross. He could have made his own the peerless words of Charles Wesley which speak for Christian mystics of all the ages ‘Ah! show me that happiest place. The place of Thy people’s abode. Where saints in an ecstasy gaze And hang on a crucified God. 'Tis there I would always abide. And never a moment depart, Concealed in the cleft of Thy side, Eternally held in Thy heart.’

Luther’s Matured Theology

i. SOLA FIDE equals SOLA GRATIA equals CHRIST US Luther the theologian is conventionally identified with ‘Justification by faith’, whether to his glory as the champion of Pauline-based Evangelical¬ ism, or to his damnation for the ‘heresy of solifidianism’. Four and a half centuries of controversy, often characterized by barren systematization or motivated by what C. H. Dodd taught us to call ‘non-theological factors’, have tended to degrade what was for Luther the most living and burning of realities into a petrified irrelevance. Leonard Hodgson (For Faith and Freedom I, io8ff.) suggests that the confusion is now so profitless that we should cease to speak of Justification by Faith at all. Yet experience - and analogy - suggest otherwise. The turning-point of the Second World War was the Battle of Alamein in 1942. Four years later (we are told) the sand had blown, slowly and inexorably, across the empty battlefield, and there was nothing left but the white crosses and the occasional bedouin camel picking its way through the sunken and rusted mines. (Moorehead, Montgomery, p. 141.) Yet after one short generation that same desert puts a fundamental question to the whole material and cultural future of the world - the power-problem of Arab oil. Even so have many of the great Christian ‘revivals’ of all ages sprung from the renewed and insistent selfassertion of ‘Justification by Faith’. The watchwords of twentieth-century theology - ‘liberalism’, ‘theocentricism’, ‘existentialism’, ‘eschatology’, ‘conservative evangelism’, ‘ecumenism’, ‘encounter’, ‘process’, even ‘secularity’, may well have a legitimate source in contemporary ‘challenge’; but their abiding relevance to the Christian Gospel can almost be measured by their fidelity to this Lutheran articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae - the ‘critical clause by which the Church stands or falls’. Nor should the theological dissection of this articulus, and the dialectical subtleties to which it necessarily led Luther and (still more) the later ‘Protestant scholastics’, obscure for one moment the overriding truth that for Luther the very heart of the Gospel is that free, willing, unconstrained, joyful obedience to God which comes from faith and never under the law. ‘He who lives in faith and in the Spirit will serve God from the heart, in freedom and gladness, and walk in His ways - ways which he loves, because it is in love and from the depths of his heart that he walks in them.’ The decisive point is that here, par excellence, Luther is thinking coram Deo. Sola fide is not one item of a doctrinal series which may or may not admit of systematic explication: it is rather the setting of the whole

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enquiry in a divine context. Donald Tovey recounts that at the first performance of Elijah at Birmingham, Mendelssohn had to submit to the destruction of a vital musical motif because Victorian England would have thought it blasphemous to change the A.V. ‘but according to my Word’ so as musically to fit the rhythm of Luther’s ‘ich sage es denn’, which ‘looms ominously’ throughout the following orchestral overture - and (he might have added) at vital moments throughout the whole oratorio. (Essays and Lectures in Music, p. 214.) Ich sage es denn —. The human arts and sciences have their own rationale and evaluation: did not Luther himself once estimate that Cicero would enjoy a situation in hell several degrees higher than the Cardinal of Mainz? But ‘we must heed that the life of action and the life of speculation do not delude us: they are each very pleasing and quiet and on that account the more perilous until they be disturbed and tempered by the Cross’. ‘It is an error to put faith and its work on a footing with the other virtues and works. Lor this faith must be held as being ekalted above all these things and a sort of general and inaccessible influence above them: by the moving and agency of which it is that all the works which are done by man, move, act and flourish and please God.’ Coram Deo. The gods of other religions and philosophies may tolerate partners or rivals: the God of the Bible is One - exclusively; and the reflex of this divine ‘One’ is the Lutheran ‘alone’ - by faith, grace, scripture, Christ alone. In his Open Letter on Translating (1530), Luther tells us that the papists are making a tremendous fuss because the word ‘only’ is not in St. Paul’s key-text on justification (Rom. 3:28). He defends himself partly by comparative linguistics - German and Latin, still more by the sense itself, with a telling reference to Rom. 4:2: ‘if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God’. He might have added the Dominical ‘fear not, only have faith’. The apparently contradictory Lutheran simul - at once righteous and a sinner etc. - is in reality an explication of the sola: the continuing paradox of ‘sinners’ and ‘justified’ is the human predicament, but were it not coram Deo - the One, Supreme, Righteous God - the sharp edges of the predicament would resolve into a mere matter of degree - ‘all cats are grey in the dark’. In line with this, Justification by Laith is the reflex of creation - of creatio ex nihilo. ‘God enjoys bringing light out of darkness and making things out of nothing. Thus He created all things and thus He justifies sinners.’ ‘We take all righteousness from men and ascribe it to the Creator who creates out of nothing.’ ‘Those who look for righteousness by their own works do nothing but try to become their own makers or creators.’ The verdict of Ps. 100 - ‘He has made us and not we ourselves’ - is as true of the new life in Christ as of the first life from birth. Even if we were perfect, God would still save us by grace and mercy alone — even if (as Augustine suggested) the Holy Spirit added a kind of supernatural capacity to fulfil the law and earn merit thereby, justification would still be God’s free gift through Christ - like creation, ex nihilo. But what is ‘justification’? The long debate down to our own day on the Pauline dikaioun has run parallel with the controversy on Luther. Is it

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‘make righteous’ or ‘declare righteous’? Linguistically, the case is incon¬ clusive: if, in Greek, analogous words like axioun (‘deem worthy’) suggest the latter, yet the presumed underlying Hebrew hitzdiq can hardly be other than the former. Doctrinally, each alternative leads to confusion. To ‘make righteous’ is (ethically) a contradiction in terms. Yet to ‘declare righteous’ someone who is ex hypothesi a sinner seems a mere ethical or legal fiction. Not even God can declare that black is white. Perhaps the best word has been spoken by T. W. Manson (Studies in Biblical Theology, No. 38, ed. M. Black) who looks on dikaioun as God’s declaration, not of an acquittal, but an amnesty - the act of a King rather than a Judge. The judicial metaphor is never far from Luther’s mind, yet this view seems true to his central intent. It is the prerogative of a King to declare an amnesty without prejudice to his sovereignty. It is the prerogative of the All-Righteous God to restore, without prejudice to His own awful purity, a lost standing to a corrupt creature. For this is where Luther began. ‘How shall a guilty sinner stand before the Living God?’ Luther’s own Anfechtung is often dismissed as a psycho¬ logical abnormality, or respectfully discounted as only one among many ‘types’ of human experience. ‘Normal’ people (it is claimed) who do not undergo such dark nights of the soul, are just as much children of God and equally entitled to their own rather less drastic ‘grace’. Such a claim misses the point. Even in the every-day physical sphere life is a continuing tension of health and disease; ‘normally’ we may achieve an equilibrium, but our trivial ailments and serious illnesses warn us of the tension that is always there. Your ‘general practitioner’ can only cure you if research into diseaseat-its-depth goes on without stint or fear, and the ‘common’ illnesses (like the cold) are often as intractable as the gravest. Mentally and morally the tension goes deeper, for here ‘normality’ is never more than apparent. Theologically it is all-embracing and reaches the heart of man, for here the very claim to ‘normality’ - the absence of any real conviction of sin - is the greatest sin of all. Those ‘doctors of the soul’ who can contribute most are precisely those who have seen God in His stainless purity and then looked with complete honesty at themselves. For Luther the vision of God is the Cross of Christ, and in its light his sin stands disclosed. ‘Original sin’ or ‘concupiscence’ is far more than the traditional lusts of the flesh: it is the inward orientation of the whole personality - its self-seeking and rebellion (conscious or unconscious) against God. ‘For Scripture describes man as incurvatum in se (‘curved inwards’), so that not only bodily goods but spiritual goods also he turns to himself, and seeks himself in all things.’ This egoism is always at work in the dark chambers of the soul. Hence, says Luther (using the current Latin version of Prov. 18:17) justus in principio est accusator sui (‘The righteous man is first and foremost an accuser of himself’). This is no mere exaltation of ethical humility. It is judicium coram Deo: ‘this crookedness and de¬ pravity is in the hidden depths of our nature, nay rather is nature itself, wounded and in ferment through the whole, so that not only is it impossible to remedy without grace, but it is impossible fully to recognize it’. Justification, then, is the restoration of our lost ‘standing’ before God,

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made necessary by the 'Fall' - the sin of Adam, the ‘original sin’ of everyman, for which he is without excuse. Luther treats the Fall as implicitly ‘from nature to sub-nature’, as distinct from the scholastic 'super-nature to nature’. God’s gifts to man - of creation, preservation and all the blessings of this life - were such that the creature should and could have spent his whole life glorifying God and enjoying Him for ever, and even so with no clairq to merit coram Deo: for ‘what hast thou that thou hast not been given?’ The fatal twist, however - the ‘incurvation’ - turned all these gifts to poison, so subtly and profoundly that only in the even more searching light of God’s renewed grace could the evil be recognized and diagnosed. How then can such a guilty sinner stand before the Living God? Justification is by faith. Here Luther may best speak for himself, in the Preface to the Epistle to the Romans (1522): ‘Faith is not that human notion and dream that some hold for faith. Because they see that no betterment of life and no good works follow it, and yet they can hear and say much about faith, they fall into error and say “Faith is not enough; one must do works in order to be righteous and be saved’’. This is why, when they hear the Gospel, they make for themselves, by their own powers, an idea in their hearts which say “I believe’’. This they hold for true faith. But it is a human imagination and idea that never reaches the heart, and so nothing comes of it and no betterment follows it. ‘Faith, however, is a divine work in us. It changes us and makes us to be born anew of God; it kills the old Adam and makes altogether different men, in heart and spirit and mind and powers, and it brings with it the Holy Ghost. O, it is a living, busy, active, mighty thing, this faith; and so it is impossible for it not to do good works incessantly —. 'Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that a man would stake his life on it a thousand times. This confidence in God’s grace and knowledge of it makes men glad and bold and happy in dealing with God and with all his creatures; and this is the work of the Holy Ghost in faith. Hence a man is ready and glad, without compulsion, to do good to everyone, to serve everyone, to suffer everything, in love and praise of God, who has shown him this grace; and thus it is impossible to separate works from faith, quite as impossible as to separate heat and light from fire —. ‘Righteousness, then, is such a faith and is called “God’s righteousness’’, or “the righteousness that avails before God’’, because God gives it and counts it as righteousness for the sake of Christ, our mediator, and makes a man give to every man what he owes him. — Such righteousness nature and free will and all our powers cannot bring into existence. No one can gives himself faith —; how then will he take away a single sin, even the very smallest? Therefore, all that is done, apart from faith, or in unbelief, is false; it is hypocrisy and sin, no matter how good a show it makes.’ From this passage, supplemented and illuminated in Luther a thousand times, central issues and difficulties in the whole doctrine become clarified. (1) Faith is not a ‘human notion or dream’ or ‘idea’ or ‘imagination’. Critics who have accused Luther of advocating salvation by ‘sentiment’.

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‘emotion’, ‘experience’ - of a back-door re-admission of justification by works - ignore the explicit insistence that faith is a divine work within us. It is the way in which Christ gives himself to us, or alternatively ‘the power which takes hold of’ (virtus apprehensiva) Christ. ‘Faith justifies because it takes hold of and possesses this treasure, the present Christ.’ ‘If God has made his righteousness mine, I am righteous with the same righteousness as his.’ The note of paradox, as with the Pauline ‘I, yet not I’, is inescapable. Faith and grace are, if one wishes, correlatives, or rather twin poles, of that mysterious tension we call ‘personal relationship’, whereby with every degree of ‘influence’ deepening to ‘communion’ and even ‘mutual indwel¬ ling’, the integrity of the individual person remains unimperilled. This is familiar enough in human relationships - above all that of love. But when God enters the scene, the paradox is complete. The communion is so close that faith, grace, and Christ - the ‘mediator’ — are one: yet there is no ‘deification’, after the fashion of the Greek Fathers. ‘When the soul is united with the Word, it becomes like the Word, just as iron becomes red like the fire in which it is heated.’ Yet the iron is still iron, and the fire is still fire. Simul iustus ac peccator — ‘at once righteous and a sinner’. From the human side one can and must analyse ‘faith’ into assent, knowledge, trust, confidence. From God’s side it is the free restoration of man’s lost standing by ‘grace’ - by the personal indwelling of Christ in his heart. (2) The righteousness that avails before God - man's restored ‘standing’ is given by God and ‘counted as’ righteousness for the sake of Christ. Luther usually describes this process by the Pauline metaphor of ‘imputa¬ tion’, and on this point controversy was to fasten. The very metaphor, from the world of commerce, has been thought unworthy of its theme. To this Professor Rupp has given a definitive answer. ‘Those who complain of (St. Paul's) figures as abstract, and as unsuited to express personal relationships, might walk through the City of London, past the Royal Exchange, the Old Bailey and the Cathedral of St. Paul. They will find there . . . those same figures, the market, the law-court, the temple and be reminded that the language of transaction, of judgement and of sacrifice sums up a good deal of the life of man in its corporate existence’ (The English Protestant Tradition, p. 159). If the metaphor of imputation fails to ‘describe the indescribable’, then so do its forensic and ecclesiastical companions. Its strength lies in its preservation of vital emphases: the righteousness of God is not impugned - He does not slacken His standards; the distinction of divine and human is maintained within an inexpressibly close and mysterious communion; the infinitely precious personal mystery of salvation is safeguarded from any hint of arithmetical ‘accountancy’, because the ‘imputed righteousness’ is a mere mask for the Living Christ; and any fear of what St. Paul calls ‘boasting’ on the ground of human merit is on principle excluded. (3) But how does Luther’s doctrine allow for real moral growth? What is the relationship